Crisis and Ethnopopulism: In Search of a New Framework of Interpretation

Type: 
Seminar
Audience: 
CEU Community Only
Building: 
Nador u. 15
Room: 
Quantum
Tuesday, December 5, 2017 - 4:00pm
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Date: 
Tuesday, December 5, 2017 - 4:00pm to 7:30pm

The workshop, forming part of the University-wide Seminar Series of CEU, focuses on crisis discourses and ethno-populist mobilization in a comparative perspective. In contrast to the fashionable approaches which start from a definition and then seek to analyze particular manifestations, we hold it more fruitful to bring together a number of research traditions and regional competences to a dialogue, hoping to generate a more context-sensitive understanding of the phenomenon. Particularly interesting in this sense is comparing the East Central European, Western European and non-European cases, as well as the dialogue of intellectual history, social history, political science, and legal perspectives. Using these approaches as vantage points for a multi-dimensional analysis, we seek to focus on three aspects in particular: 1) perceptions and symptoms of socio-economic and cultural crisis triggering populist responses; 2) modalities of populist mobilization, social networks, symbols, rhetoric, narratives of identity; and 3) populists in government, policies and (para)legal frameworks, similarities with pasts configurations of authoritarianism, and also the question of resistance to these regimes.

 

Organized by Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies at CEU, the seminar is intended as a starting point of a lasting international cooperation on the topic. Along these lines, the format of the seminar is also intended to enhance intensive dialogue, with short position papers and then a discussion on the panel and also with the audience.

 

PROGRAM

Short Introduction by Balazs Trencsenyi (CEU, History), convener

 16.00 Panel I Populist Weltanschauungen: Ideological resources and narratives

  • Constantin Iordachi (CEU, History) On Fascism and Populism
  • Mikkel Thorup (Aarhus University, Department of Culture and Society) Populist Constructions of Ethnic Otherness in Scandinavia
  • Juan Francisco Fuentes (Complutense University Madrid, History) Nationalism and Populism in the Spanish Context
  • Tomasz Zarycki (Warsaw University, Institute for Social Studies) On the Social and Geographical Imaginaries of Polish Ethno-Populism
  • Andras Bozoki (CEU, Political Science) On the Populist Critics of the Transition

 17.35 Short Coffee Break

 17.45. Panel II Mobilization and institutionalization

  • Paula Diehl (University of Bielefeld) Populism and Democracy
  • Agnes Batory (CEU, School of Public Policy) Populism in Government
  • Renata Uitz (CEU, Law) Populism and the Rule of Law
  • Bela Greskovits (CEU, Political Science, International Relations) Right-Wing Civic Activism and Party Politics
  • Sanjay Kumar (CEU, History) Neoliberalism and Ethno-Populist Mobilization in India
  • Andrea Pirro (SNS Pisa, Political Science) Comparison of Populist Political Forces in Eastern Europe and Beyond