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Alternative Folks: The Contemporary Global Contagion of Right-Wing Racist Populisms
Language: English
The growth and influence of far-right, populist, nationalist, Islamophobic, anti-asylum-seeker and anti-immigrant parties and movements in continental Europe has been phenomenal over the last decade. Such politics have also seen Brexit endorsed by plebiscite in the UK in mid-2016. Then came the shock election of racist populist Donald Trump to the US presidency in early 2017. Real insecurities attendant on globalised neoliberal restructuring have in all these cases been ideologically projected onto racialised others (not least Muslims in the context of ‘war on terror’) in narratives convincing to those especially marginalised by the restructuring. The repercussions are global, but how much are the causes shared globally?
Since about 1990, a cosmopolitan and multicultural hegemony has given way to a post- and anti-cosmopolitan crisis. Some of these ideological elements are shared internationally, but with important national, regional and local inflections. The huge transformation of the public sphere with the influence of new forms of capitalist media needs to be better understood if counter-hegemonic strategies are to be effective; the much vaunted ‘fake news’ effect in the US presidential campaign is a case in point. Central questions are: How far is this shift to far-right extremism driven by global political-economic developments? What role is played by new media and their deployment in far-right, nationalist, racist politics?
We especially welcome contributions reflecting the social reality from those ‘other’ sides of the real and metaphoric walls, bans, and other barriers that are not well reported or studied in the mainstream of the global metropole.