Professor Tariq Modood, the founding Director of the Bristol University Research Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship.

Professor Modood: A ‘Multiculturalist International’ Needed to Counter ‘Far-Right International’

by Editor’s ChoiceExtremism & RadicalisationHomeInterviewsMigration

In this wide-ranging interview with ECPS, Professor Tariq Modood calls for the creation of a “multiculturalist international” to counter the rise of far-right transnational networks and exclusionary nationalisms. Highlighting the dangers posed by xenophobia, Islamophobia, and authoritarian populism across Europe and beyond, Professor Modood argues that multiculturalism is “not simply a reaction to populism… it is a positive vision” that affirms shared citizenship while respecting diversity. He contrasts his model of “moderate secularism” with French laïcité and Hindu nationalist secularism, emphasizing inclusivity and equality. Brexit, he notes, weakened the EU’s capacity for multicultural integration: “We need to create a multiculturalist alliance across countries, in the way that the far right is creating its own transnational network.”

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In an era marked by the transnational rise of far-right populism, exclusionary nationalism, and algorithmically amplified xenophobia, Professor Tariq Modood, the founding Director of the Bristol University Research Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, offers a deeply considered and nuanced account of how multiculturalism can serve as both a critique of and alternative to these reactionary forces. As one of Europe’s leading theorists of multicultural citizenship, Professor Modood’s work insists on reconciling respect for ethno-religious group identities with an inclusive and reconstituted national identity—a project he characterizes as “multicultural nationalism.”

In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Modood explains that his vision of multiculturalism is “not simply a reaction to populism, nor a political strategy against it; it is a positive vision.” For Professor Modood, multiculturalism affirms that “we are not just individuals” but also members of groups whose identities have historically been marginalized or excluded from full membership in national life. Yet this project is integrative, not separatist: “We must not become anti-national. We must oppose the exploitation of national identity to exclude, racialize, or degrade others,” he emphasizes, rejecting both monocultural nationalism and cosmopolitan detachment.

A key element of Professor Modood’s thought is his advocacy for “moderate secularism,” which contrasts sharply with both French laïcité and authoritarian appropriations of secularism in places like India. Unlike the rigid secularism that seeks to privatize or marginalize religion, moderate secularism recognizes the public role of religious identities while embedding them in democratic equality and inclusion: “Moderate secularism can be inclusionary and potentially develop in a multiculturalist direction,” he explains.

In response to the global diffusion of far-right discourse—whether through social media networks or coordinated political strategies—Professor Modood argues for an explicitly internationalist response rooted in multicultural values. “I would like to say that one way of resisting that is trying to create a multiculturalism international—not just a far-right international, but a multiculturalism international,” he asserts. Brexit, in this regard, represented a significant setback: “When we left the European Union, much against my wishes, the European Union became weaker in relation to multiculturalism and anti-racism.”

Throughout this wide-ranging conversation, Professor Modood emphasizes that multicultural nationalism requires a “rethinking of our national identity and national story so that minority identities can become part of the national identity,” offering examples from Britain’s imperial history and inclusive popular culture, such as the 2012 London Olympics. His vision ultimately calls for a democratic, pluralistic, and solidaristic reimagining of national belonging—an urgent project in a time of resurgent authoritarianism.

Here is the transcript of our interview with Professor Tariq Modood, edited lightly for readability.

Religious tolerance-themed graffiti in Bristol, UK. August 31, 2009. Photo: Dreamstime.

Multiculturalism Is a Positive Vision, Not Just a Strategy Against Populism

Professor Tariq Modood, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: As a signatory of the June 13, 2025 anti-fascism declaration, how would you theorize the contemporary far-right populist phenomenon as an incipient form of fascism—particularly in the light of Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary and Donald Trump’s authoritarian revival in the US—and what normative resources does your conception of multicultural nationalism offer for resisting this resurgence while preserving democratic pluralism?

Professor Tariq Modood: Thank you very much for inviting me onto your site. I should explain that while I was a signatory to that letter—which I thought was important and was glad to sign—it is not, as such, an example of my own research or thinking.

You asked how I see multicultural nationalism relating to the fight against fascism and populism. The first thing to say is that I see them as connected, but not directly or immediately; they are connected through several layers of unpacking. For me, multiculturalism—the central theoretical and political idea I work with—is a positive idea and a value in itself. It is not simply a reaction to populism or a political strategy against it; it is a positive vision.

And what is this positive vision? It is the idea that we are not just individuals. We have various group identities that are important to us, and some of these identities have been the basis for exclusion from rights, opportunities, participation, and full membership in citizenship and national identity.

Multiculturalism asserts that if these identities are important and valuable to their bearers, then not only must they not be a basis for exclusion or discrimination, but they should also be valued within our common citizenship. These group memberships and identities are part of who we are—not merely abstract individuals as understood by law.

Another important identity for multiculturalism is national identity. Why? Because multiculturalism, in order to get people to respect group identities, has to work with a strong concept of citizenship. Citizenship requires respect for group identities as a basis of inclusion because citizenship is egalitarian and inclusive. But this is not just liberal citizenship focused on equality before the law and individual rights; rather, it is a stronger concept of citizenship as a collectivity with shared identity and significance for its members. Citizenship and national identity are tied together. When we appeal for multicultural equality, we appeal to citizenship, but we need a strong sense of citizenship—identifying with and insisting on our right to belong to that national identity.

That is why multiculturalism works with two identities: respect for group identities (e.g., British Pakistani, Jewish, Hindu, Black) and respect for national identity, which should bring us all together. Multiculturalism must also resist exclusion when it occurs. Once we understand this, we see that multiculturalism is diametrically opposed to monocultural nationalism, which is exclusionary and creates two tiers of citizenship: “real” nationals and second-class citizens who do not really belong. Multiculturalism is totally against that idea and, therefore, against nationalist populism—but it opposes it because of its own value commitments. It is not simply a political strategy for opposing fascism.

Multiculturalism as an Alternative Nation-Building Project

What do you take to be the normative and institutional obligations of democratic polities in mediating the tension between protecting minorities from processes of “othering” and responding to legitimate concerns of cultural majorities—particularly in contexts where populist narratives exploit these tensions?

Professor Tariq Modood: Some people who are anti-right-wing and anti-populism misunderstand the situation. You referred to those who exploit national identity and tensions within our national community—the key word being exploit. We must not become anti-national; we must oppose the exploitation of national identity to exclude, racialize, or degrade others. The national itself is not the problem. That’s why I say some anti-populists misunderstand this issue: they declare themselves anti-nationalism.

Well, I am certainly not anti-nationalism, because I support multicultural nationalism. I believe in an alternative conception of national belonging and identity that contrasts with populist, divisive, monocultural nationalism. I’m not anti-national or anti-nationalist.

The key is to reclaim the idea of the national. We mustn’t allow right-wing figures like Nigel Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, and others to define themselves as the “true nationalists” while casting people like me—and perhaps you—as anti-nationalists. No, I want to assert that I am a nationalist too, but with a better understanding of who we are today and who we can become in the future—how we can unite our nation rather than divide it, not to transcend our nation but to transform it.

In this sense, multiculturalism is an alternative nation-building project, and that’s how we counter those who exploit tensions within our national community.

Moderate Secularism as an Inclusive Alternative to Authoritarian Models

Muslims demonstrating against Islamophobia outside the Grande Mosquée de Paris, France. Photo: Tom Craig.

In what ways does your model of “moderate secularism” serve as a corrective to both French laïcité and Hindu nationalist instrumentalizations of secularism in India, and how can it safeguard against appropriation by exclusionary or authoritarian iterations of secularism emerging from the populist right?

Professor Tariq Modood: This is quite a complicated question you’ve asked me because it brings in something new—namely, the idea of moderate secularism. So, I first need to explain that idea before I can answer the rest of the question.A lot of people—liberals and progressives—say that we live in secular societies and therefore shouldn’t have religion in politics or shouldn’t have the state recognizing religious groups, Christians or Muslims or Hindus. But that’s not the reality of the societies we live in.

France is somewhat different, but Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway—these are all secular societies. No one can say they’re not secular polities, but they accommodate religion or some religions within the public sphere. They often fund various aspects of organized religious activity, whether it’s education, maintaining cathedrals and church heritage, or expecting religious organizations to provide welfare work. Germany, for instance, has an enormous welfare budget that it hands over to churches as well as collecting taxes to give to the churches.

So, I say we need a concept to describe this relationship. We are clearly secular polities—we are not run by religious organizations. Britain is not governed by the Church of England, and the Church of England is not a powerful institution. So, we are secular countries—but what kind of secularism is this? It’s not like the laïcité of France; it’s not like the secularism of the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China. Those are forms of radical secularism.

By contrast, this is a form of moderate secularism. One of the things moderate secularism can do is serve as a platform for recognizing excluded or newly settled religious minorities, like Muslims, for instance. Therefore, moderate secularism can be inclusionary and potentially develop in a multiculturalist direction, so that it doesn’t have to be exclusionary, as it is in France. Laïcité is hardening—it’s not being moderated; it’s being hardened in order to discipline or exclude Muslims, to confront them in the name of so-called secular values, national culture, or national identity. 

We have to oppose those kinds of authoritarian secularisms. Sometimes these secularisms are not quite like France in that they are not anti-religious, but rather in alliance with the majority religion. This fits the example you gave of India, where the majority religion is being reconceptualized as a national ideology: everyone has to belong, in some way or another, to this Hindu nation; otherwise, they’re not a true Indian. So that’s a kind of secularism, because otherwise India has a very pluralistic tradition—a pluralistic secularism—which is now being defeated, pushed aside by the current Modi government; they’ve been doing this for about 15 years.

That’s how moderate secularism can be inclusive—unlike the radical secularism of France or China, and unlike the majoritarian religious nationalism of countries like India or, for that matter, Turkey. Quite a few Sunni Muslim countries also move in that direction. India has taken it even further, but this kind of authoritarian religious majoritarianism is, at present, all too common in Muslim countries around the world.

Rethinking National History as a Shared Story of Inclusion

To what extent does multicultural nationalism necessitate a historiographical reconstitution of national narratives, and how can such reconstructions avoid exacerbating cultural polarization or being dismissed as an elite project of historical revisionism?

Professor Tariq Modood: That’s a good question, and I don’t really have a fully satisfactory answer, because we really do need to rethink our history. Take Britain: British Empire, British glory, conquered the world, and so on. Well, we can’t tell that story in a simplistic way, as if the British were simply on top, a superior race, doing all this to the rest of the world. We need to tell a story that is about domination and conquest, but also about mixing—how India became part of Britain because the British went out there and ruled India but did so by connecting with Indians in various ways. They certainly modified India in major ways, but there was influence coming back as well. Just think about the number of Urdu and Hindi words in the English language—it’s enough to fill a big dictionary, and these dictionaries exist.

In any case, we need to tell that history to explain how we came to be the current population of Great Britain. There’s an old political slogan: “I’m over here because you were over there.” So yes, we need to tell this story of how the British made Indians British, because my story of being a Briton does not begin when I came to Britain as a child; it’s older than that. It belongs to the British making India British—that includes my dad, my grandparents, my ancestors, and so on. I became part of the British story through a historical formation of domination and conquest—but not only so. 

In any case, we have to tell that story. I can see there are difficulties in how we tell it because it can be conflictual, and that’s something we want to avoid because multicultural nationalism is about bringing people together, respecting each other, and treating each other as equal members. So, there will be some revision and tension—I don’t think we can avoid it—but we need to try, bite the bullet, and think our way through. But there can be positive presentations; it doesn’t have to be just an elite project.

One of the best examples of a non-elite presentation of this project is the opening ceremony of the London Olympics of 2012. Have you seen it? You really should, and your readers really should. It’s not very long—about 45 minutes or so—and it told, in a dramatic, playful, and friendly way, to British people and the rest of the world, “this is the country we are.” It was a very inclusive Britain, which included people from the West Indies, Africa, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and so on—and the youth culture they have created today. So, I think there are non-elitist ways of telling this story. Probably sport is actually the main vehicle at the moment through which this story is being told—or if it’s not a story, these emotions and sensibilities are being formed. We have lots of Black players in our football teams, followed all over the world, and in our national team as well. We have multi-ethnic cricket teams and other sports. Entertainment is a real melting pot or mixing place for people of different heritages and colors, who then put on an England shirt or a British badge and are cheered and recognized as such by all the fans. So that’s another way of doing it in a non-elitist way.

Respect for Group Identities Must Go Hand in Hand with Shared National Belonging

Women in festive costumes with decorative flowers in their hair dance through the streets during the annual Belfast Mela Carnival Parade, celebrating multiculturalism and diversity in Belfast, UK, on August 17, 2024. Photo: Dreamstime.

How do you address critiques that your emphasis on the public recognition of ethno-religious identities risks entrenching communitarian enclaves, as critics argue may be occurring in parts of Belgium or Germany, potentially impeding the development of integrative civic identities?

Professor Tariq Modood: Yes, I can see that sometimes ethnic community identities, based on flows of migrations over 50 years or so, can sometimes become segregated parts of cities and can be quite inward-looking. There are a number of aspects to this. One is that when people come to a city or country, they obviously need to meet people who speak their language and who can guide them, assist them, advise them about housing, work, schools for their children, where to shop for food they want, and about places of worship—they may want to live near a temple or mosque. So, all these things lead to a certain amount of clustering, and that’s very understandable.

But they may also feel unsafe because they fear racist abuse against themselves, the elderly, or their children. So again, they may huddle together for safety. We also have the phenomenon of white flight: when significant numbers of ethnic minorities move into a neighborhood or street, white residents begin to leave. That, of course, makes it more of a ghetto, more segregated. So, we do have to avoid segregated communities—it is an issue. We have to encourage people to mix more. Certainly, we have to protect them from racist abuse in the street and in workplaces, and from violence against themselves, their property, cultural centers, mosques, and so on. All those things need to be done to enable people to more freely spread out and not be so concentrated together.

Moreover, there are issues to do with identity. Going back to the beginning helps me round this off. I said it is important for multiculturalists to respect group identities that their bearers value, but at the same time, to allow everyone to join in, share in, and take pride in our national identity and citizenship. Similarly, when it comes to what are called divisive identities or communitarianism, we need to encourage these dual identities—they are not just dual, really, they are multiple. But the key point is that we need to encourage identities that matter to individuals as members of a group, while also encouraging identities that matter to them as members of their country.

For multiculturalism in particular, the important thing is that these aren’t just two things we do in parallel, but that we bring them together and do them together. One way of doing this is by rethinking our national identity and national story so that minority identities can become part of the national identity. I gave you examples of how the British coming to India made my ancestors and my family part of Britain—and so we need to recognize that. I also gave you the example of the London Olympic opening ceremony, which celebrated an idea of what it is to be British that was not tied to being white, Christian, or secular. It was tied to other identities important to people as well, not forgetting national identities such as Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish. These are ways we can avoid narrow identities, because we want to respect identities—but within a national framework of equality, inclusion, recognition, and valuing ourselves as members of a national community.

Multiculturalist International vs. Far-Right International

Given the anti-fascist imperative to “defy authoritarianism globally,” how might multicultural frameworks respond to transnational threats such as algorithmic disinformation networks amplifying xenophobia, global Islamophobia intensified by networks stretching from India to Europe, and exclusionary imaginaries promoted by far-right parties like Alternative für Deutschland or Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia?

Professor Tariq Modood: Your question brings together a number of things. Firstly, some fascist and racist messages become transnational. I understand that, of course, because the social media we are using is global and things go viral on it—it’s a real problem. But of course, the opposite—positive messages—can also become global and viral. For example, Black Lives Matter wasn’t simply a local Minnesota thing or even just a US movement; it became very important in Britain, parts of Europe, and other parts of the world. So clearly, social media has both positive and very negative, divisive aspects.

Another part of your question was about the power of certain projections like Alternative für Deutschland, because AfD is really quite a national project—they’re not trying to be transnational—but various kinds of far-right groups are connecting in a transnational way. That is obvious, often led by the American far right or by Hungarian-sponsored conferences and networks because of Orbán. So yes, they want to group together, and it’s quite paradoxical that they do, because they all want to say their country is the most important—make America great again, make Germany great again, leave the EU, make Britain great again, etc.—and yet they see they can best cooperate because they have a similar message in their own countries.

I would like to say that one way of resisting that is trying to create a multiculturalism international—not just a far-right international, but a multiculturalism international. In this regard, Brexit was really very disappointing for people like me, because I think that Britain is the most multiculturalist country in Europe. So, when we left the European Union, much against my wishes and for other reasons as well, the European Union became weaker in relation to multiculturalism and anti-racism. So, I do think we need to create a multiculturalist alliance across countries, in the way that the far right is creating its own kind of exclusionary nationalism within a transnational network.

Chloé Ridel, Member of the European Parliament from the Socialist Group and Rapporteur for transnational repression, during her interview with ECPS’s Selcuk Gultasli. Photo: Umit Vurel.

EP Rapporteur Ridel: EU Should Expand Sanctions Regime to Effectively Target Transnational Repression

by Digital-populismEditor’s ChoiceHomeHuman RightsInterviews

In an exclusive interview with ECPS, MEP Chloé Ridel, rapporteur for the European Parliament’s forthcoming report on transnational repression, underscores the urgent need for the EU to confront transnational repression—state-organized efforts by authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran to silence critics abroad. Ridel calls for expanding the EU’s Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime to explicitly include transnational repression and highlights the procedural challenge posed by unanimity voting: “The only people we manage to sanction are mostly Russian… we will have difficulties applying the values we believe in.” She stresses that this is a human rights, security, and democratic issue requiring coordination, oversight of enablers, and stronger protection for vulnerable groups.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In a context of intensifying authoritarian encroachment beyond national borders, transnational repression has emerged as a growing threat to Europe’s democratic integrity, sovereignty, and human rights commitments. Authoritarian regimes—including Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran—have refined techniques of intimidation and control targeting exiles, dissidents, and diaspora communities residing in democratic states, employing legal tools such as Interpol Red Notices, coercion-by-proxy against relatives, and increasingly sophisticated forms of digital harassment. In her capacity as rapporteur for the European Parliament’s forthcoming report on transnational repression, MEP Chloé Ridel of the Socialists and Democrats Group has foregrounded the urgency of a robust, coordinated European response.

In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), MEP Ridel makes a compelling case for expanding the EU’s Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime to address transnational repression explicitly. She explains that “there is already an EU sanctions regime that exists, and we want this regime to also apply to states that commit transnational repression.” MEP Ridel’s recommendation is clear: the EU must recognize transnational repression as a distinct pattern of authoritarian interference, codify it in sanctions policy, and ensure it can be enforced consistently across Member States.

MEP Ridel is also critical of the procedural obstacles that blunt the effectiveness of EU sanctions, pointing to the unanimity requirement that has resulted in skewed enforcement patterns: “The only people we manage to sanction are mostly Russian; 70% of those sanctioned under the EU sanctions regime are from Russia.” Without reforms enabling qualified majority voting for sanctions decisions, she warns, “we will have difficulties applying the values we believe in on human rights.”

This approach, MEP Ridel emphasizes, is inseparable from broader efforts to coordinate intelligence, protect vulnerable groups such as women, human rights defenders, and hold enablers—particularly social media platforms—accountable. “States rely on enablers such as social media platforms and spyware businesses, and these enablers must also be held accountable,” she argues. In advocating for expert focal points on transnational repression in both EU delegations and national administrations, Ridel calls for the EU to develop institutional expertise to “help victims of transnational repression” who often “don’t even know they are victims” until attacked.

This interview provides an incisive analysis of the tools and frameworks required to confront transnational repression effectively. EP rapporteur Ridel’s proposals offer a principled roadmap for embedding human rights and democratic sovereignty at the heart of EU foreign and security policy.

Chloé Ridel, Member of the European Parliament from the Socialist Group and EP Rapporteur for transnational repression.

Here is the transcript of our interview with MEP Chloé Ridel, edited lightly for readability.

Transnational Repression Must Be Defined Properly

Chloé Ridel, thank you very much for joining our interview series. First of all, can you please tell us about the fate of the report? You submitted it to the subcommittee on human rights. What will happen next?

MEP Chloé Ridel: I submitted my draft report in June to the Committee on Human Rights, which is a subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee here in the European Parliament. Time was then allowed for other political groups to table amendments, which will be discussed throughout September. We will have a vote in the Foreign Affairs Committee in October, followed by the final vote in the plenary session of the European Parliament at the end of November.

Your draft report acknowledges the lack of a universally accepted definition of transnational repression. How should the EU conceptualize this phenomenon in legal and policy terms, especially considering the practices of regimes like Turkey, Iran, China, and Russia, to ensure both legal precision and operational flexibility?

MEP Chloé Ridel: Yes, you’re absolutely right. There is no definition of transnational repression in EU law or international law. Recently, the UN adopted a definition for transnational repression because it’s a growing phenomenon, as I tried to describe in my report. So, I suggest an EU definition for transnational repression because if we don’t know what it is, we cannot fight it properly. We define transnational repression as “state-organized actions that cross borders to coerce, control, or silence individuals through physical, legal, or digital means.”

This is a growing and quite concentrated phenomenon: 80% of all transnational repression actions are committed by just 10 states. Among these states are China, Turkey, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Belarus, and Russia. It is committed by authoritarian regimes that seek to silence members of their diaspora, political opponents, or journalists. For the EU, it’s a significant challenge because it constitutes foreign interference, is a security matter, and targets human rights defenders whom we have an interest in protecting — and we are not doing enough to protect them.

Transnational Repression Is a Security Issue, a Human Rights Issue, and a Democratic Issue

Given that transnational repression by authoritarian and repressive regimes blurs the lines between external authoritarian influence and internal security threats, should the EU frame this challenge primarily as a human rights issue, a security concern, or a hybrid phenomenon demanding an integrated policy response?

MEP Chloé Ridel: I think this is all of it at once. It is a human rights issue, of course, because it targets human rights defenders, and I will return to that. It is also a security and sovereignty issue because we cannot accept that foreign authoritarian regimes come to our streets to threaten people who are legal residents and under our protection. It becomes a threat to us as well. Unfortunately, transnational repression continues to occur in Europe. It includes physical threats, poisoning, and digital surveillance. Take the example of the Russian diaspora: after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, more than 90 Russian journalist agencies came to Europe to continue their work freely. It is in our interest to protect these journalists because they are the last free Russian journalists in the world, and they still speak to the Russian people. We know that Putin expands his power by controlling people’s minds, and if we want to fight this kind of war with Putin, we need free journalism that can still speak to the Russian people back home. So yes, it is a security issue, a human rights issue, and also a democratic issue.

EU’s Digital Services Act Must Hold Platforms Accountable

Authoritarian regimes including China, Russia, Turkey and Iran have weaponized digital platforms to target exiles. How can the EU ensure that the Digital Services Act is effectively enforced to mitigate these risks, particularly protecting vulnerable groups like women human rights defenders from online harassment orchestrated by authoritarian actors?

MEP Chloé Ridel: As you pointed out very well, digital transnational repression is growing and authoritarian regimes use social media to harass opponents, often targeting women, sometimes through the circulation of sexualized content. This is a specific and growing form of violence, and social media platforms are enabling it. They are not doing enough to prevent transnational repression online, and they should. By companies, I mean the platforms themselves, because they now constitute major public spaces where public debate happens. 

We need rules because we cannot have such impactful public spaces controlled by private companies without oversight. In Europe, we voted for a strong legislative framework, the Digital Services Act (DSA), but we are still waiting for it to be effectively enforced. For example, an investigation was opened against X (formerly Twitter) two years ago, but there are still no conclusions or sanctions, despite clear violations of the DSA—there is no content moderation, widespread disinformation, and manipulation of algorithms to boost certain types of content. We need effective enforcement of the DSA to hold these big companies accountable. While transnational repression is state-organized, states rely on enablers, such as social media platforms and spyware businesses, and these enablers must also be held accountable for that repression.

Iran, Egypt, Turkey and Tajikistan are notorious for coercion-by-proxy, targeting relatives of exiles to silence dissent abroad. What practical measures can the EU adopt to recognize, document, and respond to this diffuse and intimate form of repression?

MEP Chloé Ridel: You are right, transnational repression can occur when authoritarian regimes target family members who remain in the home country while someone goes abroad to seek exile or refuge. And it’s very difficult. Currently, the EU does not protect family members who may be threatened by authoritarian regimes simply because they are related to a prominent human rights defender or similar figure. So, I think we should enable the EU program called ProtectDefenders.eu to also protect family members of a defender, not just the defender themselves, because we know that authoritarian regimes use threats against family to repress human rights defenders.

A Coordinated EU Response Needed to Stop Abuse of Red Notices

Given that Turkey, Russia, and China systematically abuse Interpol Red Notices and extradition treaties to pursue political exiles, what reforms should the EU promote within its judicial cooperation frameworks and at Interpol to prevent instrumentalization while safeguarding legitimate law enforcement cooperation?

MEP Chloé Ridel: The abuse of Interpol Red Notices is a very important matter for me, and it’s a key part of my report because, as you mentioned, even though Interpol is aware of abuses, the problem persists. Authoritarian regimes continue to send or request Red Notices against human rights defenders, even though these notices are supposedly intended to target terrorists or very serious criminals. For example, there are currently more than 200 Red Notices from Tajikistan targeting human rights defenders living in the EU. So, we need to raise awareness among member states not to arrest or execute these notices and to develop a coordinated EU response on this issue.

In my report, I suggest that transnational repression be included in Europol’s mandate, so that Europol can assess the relevance of Red Notices when they target human rights defenders and provide assessments to member states, exerting pressure on national governments not to execute abusive Red Notices. 

For example, there was the case of an Iranian activist in Italy in 2017 who was arrested based on a Red Notice from Iran and later freed. There was also the case of Paul Watson, an environmental activist defending whales, who was targeted by a Red Notice from Japan. He could live freely in France and Germany but was ultimately arrested by Denmark based on this Red Notice. What kind of coordination is this? He was eventually freed, but only after months in jail, and clearly the Red Notice against him was abusive.

We need to stop this abuse, and one way to do so is to involve the EU—not by giving the EU the power to execute Red Notices, which remains a national competence—but by enabling it to assess and declare when a Red Notice is abusive and should not be executed.

“We Must Coordinate at EU Level to Tackle Transnational Repression”

Chloé Ridel, Member of the European Parliament from the Socialist Group and EP Rapporteur  for transnational repression.

How can the EU promote harmonization of national legal frameworks to ensure that no Member State becomes a permissive jurisdiction or “safe haven” for authoritarian actors from regimes such as Belarus or Egypt, while respecting national sovereignty and legal diversity?

MEP Chloé Ridel: We need more coordination at the EU level to tackle transnational repression. Transnational repression should be more widely discussed among ministers of internal affairs, security, foreign affairs, and heads of state as well. It was discussed recently at the G7 forum, and it is a matter for all democracies because we can see a kind of authoritarian internationalism building itself, notably through transnational repression, where authoritarian regimes help each other control, coerce, and silence their political opposition. We have an interest in protecting this political opposition because they are sometimes the last free voices of civil society in some countries.

We need to do more to coordinate at the European level and to raise awareness at the European level. Sometimes I have noticed during my work on this report that security services have difficulty assessing and recognizing transnational repression. So, I suggested in my report having an expert on transnational repression in each security administration in each member state—a contact point or something like that. For instance, this exists in Canada, Australia, and the US, where they have teams specifically responsible for transnational repression involving many different ministries. It is important that we build expertise within each nation on transnational repression and that all of this be coordinated at the European level.

Oppressive states like Turkey and China often use religious, cultural, and educational institutions abroad as instruments of covert surveillance and influence. How should EU policy distinguish and regulate these activities to protect democratic norms without stigmatizing legitimate diaspora engagement?

MEP Chloé Ridel: Sure. I think this is indeed a problem, and we need to control funds that go to religious institutions, for instance. We cannot allow authoritarian or adverse regimes to fund NGOs or religious institutions on European soil without oversight of how those funds are used. This is something we must address because it’s a growing and concerning phenomenon.

Prevent Discrimination and Promote Integration to Counter Radicalization

Given that authoritarian regimes actively manipulate divisions within diasporas—for example, Turkey’s polarization of Turkish communities in Europe—how should EU integration and anti-radicalization strategies respond to these fractures to avoid inadvertently amplifying authoritarian influence?

MEP Chloé Ridel: This is another topic—it’s not transnational repression per se, but rather manipulation of diasporas to harm a country or create conflict. We can see it in my country, France, where there is a Turkish association called the Grey Wolves, a very dangerous group that was ultimately banned and dissolved. It’s an example because there were violent demonstrations by members of this group, and they exerted a kind of control over the Turkish diaspora in France, dictating how they should behave, which also prevented good integration into French society for Turkish immigrants.

We need to fight back and have state solutions against such extremist associations. We must also ensure that public services and integration services—through work, language learning, and civic values—are available so that we can prevent radicalization. Radicalization happens when there is discrimination; extremists target marginalized people and say, “France is discriminating against you, it doesn’t want you here, so you should abide by this ideology instead.” To prevent that, we must prevent discrimination and ensure that these individuals feel part of the national community in Europe. It’s a matter of integration to fight radicalization, and also a security matter: to be able to identify and prohibit such associations and groups when they form, if they are dangerous.

Coordinated EU Action Key to Protecting Rights Defenders

Your report recommends focal points on human rights defenders within EU delegations. What skills, mandates, and resources will these officers need to respond effectively to transnational repression, particularly from aggressive regimes like Russia and China, in high-risk environments?

MEP Chloé Ridel: It’s important that we have contact points in every EU delegation throughout the world that can gather information on how authoritarian regimes exert transnational repression. Coordination is key to fighting this growing phenomenon. We need contact points both in EU delegations and in each national administration, and through the exchange of information we can tackle it. We are stronger together in Europe; if we gather information and experts across different countries and Europe plays a coordinating role, we can collect valuable intelligence and help victims of transnational repression. Sometimes they don’t even know they are victims—there are people being followed or surveilled until the day they are attacked; people who have spyware on their phones and don’t know it because they are not trained in cybersecurity.

In my report, I want to incentivize and raise awareness about spyware, to emphasize that, first, the EU should ban the export of spyware technologies produced in Europe to authoritarian regimes, because we know this will be used against us and against human rights defenders on our soil. We should also, when we know that a human rights defender is at risk of transnational repression, say: come to our office, we will explain a few security rules to you as a matter of prevention so you can regularly check your phones or computers to ensure there is no spyware, because nowadays it’s very easy to hide spyware on a phone or computer.

And lastly, do you see a role for the EU in spearheading an international legal instrument specifically addressing transnational repression, modeled on Magnitsky-style sanctions, to confront regimes such as Belarus, Saudi Arabia, China and Turkey? How might this enhance global accountability and norm-setting?

Chloé Ridel: Actually, there is already an EU sanctions regime that exists and we want this regime to also apply to states that commit transnational repression. So, I call in my report to enlarge the EU sanctions regime so that it effectively targets transnational repression. There is also a longstanding demand from our group, the Socialists and Democrats group, that EU sanctions be decided by qualified majority and not unanimity, because with unanimity, often you go nowhere. The only people we manage to sanction are mostly Russian; 70% of those sanctioned under the EU sanctions regime are from Russia. I’m sure many more countries I’ve described to you could be sanctioned in the name of human rights and under the EU sanctions regime. So, if we don’t move toward qualified majority, we will have difficulties applying the values we believe in on human rights. 

SummerSchool

ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 — Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders

by ArticlesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHIGHLIGHTSHomeReports

The ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 brought together leading scholars to examine how populism and climate change intersect—a dynamic that now shapes global governance, political polarization, and environmental policy. Across nine lectures, participants critically explored how populist movements exploit climate debates, from outright denialism to attacks on climate elites and institutions. These sessions highlighted profound tensions: how can we promote equitable, science-based climate action in an era of rising populism, misinformation, and distrust of expertise? The collection of reports and video recordings now available captures these rich interdisciplinary discussions, offering essential resources for researchers, policymakers, and citizens alike. Engage with this unique body of work to better understand the challenges—and possibilities—for climate governance and democracy in the 21st century.

Reported by ECPS Staff

The ECPS Summer School 2025 offered a rigorous, interdisciplinary examination of how populism intersects with the climate crisis—a nexus increasingly shaping politics globally. Climate change is no longer a purely environmental issue; it is deeply entwined with economic, social, cultural, and political dynamics that populist movements actively exploit. Whether through denialism, deregulation, appeals to “the people” against “globalist elites,” or opportunistic co-optation of environmental grievances, populist narratives have reshaped climate debates in ways that complicate international cooperation and local policymaking.

Across nine lectures by leading scholars—including experts in environmental politics, disinformation, conflict studies, political psychology, and critical theory—the program investigated both the challenges and opportunities posed by populist interventions in climate governance. Participants explored key questions: How do populists construct climate skepticism? When can populism mobilize for climate justice rather than obstruct it? What is the role of disinformation infrastructures in shaping climate discourse? And how do structural inequalities, colonial legacies, and class power inflect contemporary climate conflicts?

The summer school addressed the profound tension between the urgent need for global climate action and the populist turn toward polarization, distrust of expertise, and nationalist retrenchment. From analyses of right-wing anti-environmentalism in the Trump era to debates over “eco-populism,” climate-related rural protests, and the technopolitics of AI and climate governance, the lectures illuminated how climate action itself is a contested terrain.

Readers and audiences are invited to access comprehensive reports and video recordings of all lectures—a vital resource for scholars, practitioners, policymakers and citizens seeking to understand the fraught intersection of populism and climate change. The collection not only documents the state of scholarly thinking on these urgent issues but also provides conceptual and practical insights for crafting equitable, democratic, and resilient climate policies in an age of populist challenge.

Watch, read, and engage with these materials to critically examine the pathways forward in one of the defining crises of our time. 

Lecture 2 — Professor John Meyer: Climate Justice and Populism

In his lecture at the ECPS Summer School 2025, Professor John M. Meyer offered a compelling exploration of the relationship between populism and climate politics. He critiqued authoritarian populism as a threat to equitable climate action while also questioning mainstream climate governance’s elitist, technocratic tendencies. Rather than viewing populism solely as an obstacle, Professor Meyer argued that climate justice movements themselves embody a form of inclusive, democratic populism—centered on equity, participation, and solidarity. Drawing on examples from grassroots activism and Naomi Klein’s concept of “eco-populism,” Professor Meyer proposed that climate action must address material injustices and engage people where they are. His lecture encouraged participants to rethink populism as a political form that, when inclusive and justice-oriented, can help build legitimate, durable, and democratic climate solutions.

 

Lecture 3 — Professor Sandra Ricart: Climate Change, Food, Farmers, and Populism

Professor Sandra Ricart delivered a timely and insightful lecture on the intersection of climate change, agriculture, and populism in Europe. She explored how structural and demographic challenges, including a declining farming population and economic precarity, have fueled widespread farmer protests across the continent. Prof. Ricart emphasized how these grievances, while rooted in genuine hardship, have increasingly been exploited by far-right populist movements eager to position themselves as defenders of rural interests against European institutions. Her analysis highlighted the pressures created by climate change, policy reforms, and global market dynamics, and she called for more inclusive, responsive, and sustainable agricultural policies. Prof. Ricart’s lecture provided participants with a critical understanding of rural Europe’s evolving political and environmental landscape.

 

Lecture 4 — Professor Daniel Fiorino: Ideology Meets Interest Group Politics – The Trump Administration and Climate Mitigation

The fourth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 featured Professor Daniel Fiorino, a leading expert on environmental policy at American University. Professor Fiorino examined how right-wing populism—characterized by distrust of expertise, nationalism, and hostility to multilateralism—combined with entrenched fossil fuel interests to undermine climate mitigation efforts in the United States during the Trump administration. He highlighted the geographic and partisan divides that shape US climate politics and explained how Republican dominance in fossil fuel-dependent states reinforces skepticism toward climate action. Professor Fiorino’s lecture underscored the vulnerability of US climate policy to political polarization and partisan shifts, warning that right-wing populism poses an enduring challenge not only to American climate governance but to global efforts to address the climate crisis.

 

Lecture 5 — Dr. Heidi Hart: Art Attacks – Museum Vandalism as a Populist Response to Climate Trauma?

Dr. Heidi Hart’s lecture illuminated the provocative intersection of art, activism, and climate trauma. Through an interdisciplinary lens, she explored why climate activists increasingly target iconic artworks in museums as sites of performative protest, interpreting these acts not as mere vandalism but as symbolic disruptions challenging elitist cultural values amid ecological crises. Drawing on frameworks from populism studies, art history, and affect theory, Dr. Hart examined how these interventions reflect a passionate response to climate grief and injustice. Her analysis underscored the importance of understanding such protests within broader debates on decolonization, posthumanism, and collective responsibility, encouraging participants to view artistic destruction as both a critique of cultural complacency and a call for ecological transformation.

 

Lecture 6 — Professor Eric Swyngedouw: The Climate Deadlock and The Unbearable Lightness of Climate Populism

In his compelling lecture, Professor Erik Swyngedouw offered a radical critique of contemporary climate discourse, describing it as trapped in a “climate deadlock” where knowledge and activism coexist with deepening ecological crisis. He argued that mainstream and radical climate narratives mirror the structure of populism, constructing simplistic binaries while displacing attention from capitalism’s core role in driving environmental destruction. Professor Swyngedouw challenged participants to recognize that the environmental apocalypse is not an imminent future but an unevenly distributed present reality for much of the world. His provocative call to dismantle the comforting fantasy of a unified humanity urged a re-politicization of the climate crisis, demanding systemic transformation and solidarity grounded in confronting global inequalities.

 

Lecture 7 — Professor Philippe Le Billon: Climate Change, Natural Resources and Conflicts

Professor Philippe Le Billon’s lecture critically examined how climate-related conflicts emerge from three sources: the impacts of climate change itself, contestation over climate inaction, and backlash against climate action. He argued that climate change operates as a “threat multiplier,” intensifying pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities rather than acting as an isolated trigger of violence. He explored how climate activism—while driven by moral urgency—can be framed as elitist and provoke populist opposition, and how the implementation of climate policy can generate new conflicts when perceived as unjust or technocratic. Professor Le Billon warned that “green capitalism” risks reproducing extractive logics, creating new “green sacrifice zones,” and underscored that climate justice requires confronting colonial legacies, class inequality, and structural power relations.

 

Lecture 8 — Professor Stephan Lewandowsky: Climate Change, Populism, and Disinformation

The eighth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 was delivered online by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a globally recognized expert on misinformation and political psychology. His presentation offered a penetrating analysis of how climate disinformation is fueled by an organized infrastructure of vested interests and amplified by populist politics, which undermine trust in science. Professor Lewandowsky highlighted that ideological commitments—particularly free-market conservatism—strongly shape public acceptance of climate science. He emphasized that communicating the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change can be a powerful corrective but cautioned that disinformation thrives in an environment where politics and identity outweigh facts. His lecture underscored the urgent need to confront these structural and ideological barriers to effective climate action.

 

Lecture 9 – Professor Robert Huber: Populist Narratives on Sustainability, Energy Resources and Climate Change

In his lecture at the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, Professor Robert Huber examined how populist parties across Europe construct climate skepticism, emphasizing that populism’s “thin-centered ideology” (as defined by Cas Mudde) pits “the pure people” against “corrupt elites.” This framing makes climate science and policy institutions prime targets for populist critique. Professor Huber’s expert survey of 31 European countries showed a clear trend: the more populist a party, the more skeptical it is of climate policy and climate science, regardless of its left- or right-wing orientation. He cautioned participants to disentangle populism from related ideologies like nationalism or authoritarianism, underscoring that populism’s challenge to climate politics is complex, context-dependent, and shaped by deeper struggles over legitimacy, authority, and representation.

Participants of the ECPS Conference 2025 at St Cross College, University of Oxford, gather for a group photo on July 1, 2025.

‘We, the People’ and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches

by ArticlesEditor’s ChoiceHIGHLIGHTSHomeReports

Explore the key debates from “We, the People and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches,” held at Oxford University in July 2025. The conference brought together leading scholars to examine how “the people” are invoked to both erode and renew democracy worldwide. Now, readers and audiences can access detailed reports and full video recordings of all panels and roundtables—an essential resource for anyone engaged with questions of democratic resilience, populism, identity, and governance. Revisit these rich interdisciplinary discussions and reflect on a central challenge of our time: under what conditions can appeals to “the people” revitalize democracy rather than undermine it? Engage now with the ideas shaping the global conversation on democracy’s future.

Reported by ECPS Staff

Between July 1–3, 2025, scholars, practitioners, and students gathered at St. Cross College, Oxford University, for We, the People and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches—an intensive programme examining how invocations of “the people” shape democratic resilience and backsliding globally. The ECPS event unfolded against a sobering backdrop: between 2012 and 2024, one-fifth of the world’s democracies disappeared, while rising populist discourse—framing politics through stark “us vs. them” binaries—has undermined social cohesion across many societies.

Throughout the programme, participants explored how the concept of “the people” can both erode and renew democratic life. Panel and roundtables interrogated when this notion acts as a democratizing force and when it becomes a tool for exclusionary majoritarianism. The interdisciplinary and comparative nature of the discussions was key: scholars from history, philosophy, political theory, sociology, law, and the arts examined the interplay between populism, identity, legitimacy, and governance across transatlantic and global European contexts.

Major themes included the conceptual ambiguity of “the people” as a political category; its mobilization in both progressive and authoritarian populisms; the impact of identity politics on liberal democratic institutions; the entanglement of religion, nationalism, and populism; the challenges posed by algorithmic governance and AI; and the resilience or vulnerability of constitutional structures under populist pressure. Sessions addressed populist assaults on democratic checks and balances, the politicization of referenda, the erosion of judicial independence, and contested narratives around belonging, migration, and climate policy.

The event also served as the launch of an extended virtual programme (September 2025–April 2026), designed to continue this dialogue through bi-weekly online workshops, encouraging sustained scholarly exchange on the crisis and promise of democracy.

The programme underscored a central question: under what conditions can appeals to “the people” revitalize democratic politics rather than undermine its pluralistic foundations? By fostering dialogue across disciplines and global perspectives, We, the People and the Future of Democracy offered a critical intervention into one of today’s defining global challenges, illuminating both the fragility and resilience of democracy in the 21st century.

Taking this occasion as an opportunity, ECPS expresses its profound gratitude to St. Cross College for hosting this conference; to our valued partners—the Oxford Network of Peace Studies (OxPeace), Rothermere American Institute, Humanities Division, European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, and Oxford Democracy Network—for their vital collaboration; and to all our sponsors, whose support made this timely and urgent gathering not only possible but truly impactful.

Readers and audiences can access comprehensive reports and full video recordings of all sessions from the three-day conference below, providing an opportunity to revisit and engage with the rich, interdisciplinary discussions that unfolded throughout the event.

 

Opening Session

The ECPS Conference 2025 at the University of Oxford began with a timely and thought-provoking opening session that explored the evolving meaning and political utility of “the people” in democratic discourse. Sümeyye Kocaman offered a nuanced welcome, highlighting how the term has been used across history to empower, exclude, and politicize identity. Kate Mavor, Master of St Cross College, underscored the value of interdisciplinary exchange in addressing democratic challenges, noting how the College’s diverse academic environment aligned naturally with the conference’s aims. Baroness Janet Royall then delivered a compelling keynote, warning of the double-edged nature of “the people” as both democratic ideal and populist tool. Her address emphasized the need for inclusion, institutional integrity, civic renewal, and interdisciplinary cooperation in the face of democratic erosion. The session set the stage for critical and globally relevant dialogue across disciplines.

 

Panel I — Politics of Social Contract

Panel I brought together diverse approaches to examine how democratic legitimacy, resistance, and pluralism are evolving in the face of global democratic backsliding. Chaired by Dr. Lior Erez (Oxford University), the panel featured Professor Robert Johns and collaborators presenting experimental research on public support for human rights under repression; Nathan Tsang (USC) explored how Hong Kong diaspora communities engage in covert resistance through cultural expression; and Simon Clemens (Humboldt University) introduced Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitical philosophy, proposing a radical politics of coexistence over consensus. Together, the presentations reflected on how the idea of “the people” is being contested, reimagined, and mobilized across social, empirical, and philosophical registers.

 

Roundtable I — Politics of the ‘People’ in Global Europe

Chaired by Professor Jonathan Wolff, the session explored how “the people” is constructed, contested, and deployed in contemporary European and global politics. Presentations by Professors Martin Conway, Aurelien Mondon, and Luke Bretherton examined the historical resurgence of popular politics, the elite-driven narrative of the “reactionary people,” and the theological dimensions of populism. Together, the contributions offered a nuanced, interdisciplinary account of how populism’s democratic and anti-democratic potentials shape the political imagination and institutional realities of the 21st century.

 

Panel 2 — “The People” in the Age of AI and Algorithms

Panel II explored how digital technologies and algorithmic infrastructures are reshaping democratic life. Co-chaired by Dr. Alina Utrata and Professor Murat Aktaş, the session tackled questions of power, exclusion, and political agency in the digital age. Together, their framing set the stage for two timely papers examining how algorithmic filtering, platform capitalism, and gendered data practices increasingly mediate who is counted—and who is excluded—from “the people.” With insight and urgency, the session called for renewed civic, academic, and regulatory engagement with the democratic challenges posed by artificial intelligence and transnational tech governance.

Panel III gathered five scholars from the Jean Monnet Chair in European Constitutional Democracy (EUCODEM) at the University of Barcelona to explore how populist forces are challenging liberal-democratic norms—and what institutional remedies might resist them. Chaired by Dr. Bruno Godefroy, the session addressed threats to judicial independence, the populist appropriation of secessionist demands, and the theoretical underpinnings of populism as a political strategy. It also examined the role of parliaments and second chambers in preserving constitutional order. Drawing from both comparative and case-specific perspectives—ranging from Spain and Scotland to Canada and the United States—the panel provided a timely and interdisciplinary diagnosis of populism’s constitutional impact and offered potential avenues for democratic resilience in increasingly polarized societies.

 

Panel 4 — Politics of Belonging: Voices and Silencing

Panel IV explored the theme “Politics of Belonging: Voices and Silencing.” Chaired by Dr. Azize Sargın (ECPS), the panel investigated how belonging is constructed and contested through populist discourse and historical memory. Dr. Maarja Merivoo-Parro (University of Jyväskylä) examined olfactory memory and grassroots aid in Estonia’s democratic awakening. Maria Jerzyk (Masaryk University) analyzed how the figure of the child is symbolically instrumentalized in Polish populism, revealing deep continuities with communist-era narratives. Together, the papers offered rich insights into how identity, exclusion, and affect shape democratic participation in post-authoritarian and populist contexts.

 

Panel 5 — Governing the ‘People’: Divided Nations

Panel V explored how contested constructions of “the people” are shaped by populist discourse across national, religious, and ideological contexts. Co-chaired by Dr. Leila Alieva and Professor Karen Horn, the session featured presentations by Natalie Schwabl (Sorbonne University), Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz (Northeastern University), and Petar S. Ćurčić (Institute of European Studies, Belgrade). The panel examined Catholic nationalism in Croatia, American Christian ethno-populism, and the evolving German left, offering sharp insights into the manipulation of collective identity and memory in populist projects. Bridging multiple regions and disciplines, the panel revealed populism’s capacity to reframe belonging in deeply exclusionary and globally resonant ways.

 

Panel 6 — The ‘People’ in Search of Democracy

Panel VI brought urgent focus to the evolving meaning of democratic agency. Chaired by Dr. Max Steuer (Comenius University, Bratislava), the session opened with a reflection on whether democracy and “the people” can be conceptually disentangled. Rashad Seedeen examined how Gramsci’s war of position and Wright’s real utopias intersect in Indigenous civil society initiatives. Jana Ruwayha analyzed how prolonged emergencies blur legal norms, threatening democratic accountability. Özge Derman showcased how the “we” is performatively constructed in Occupy Wall Street and the Gezi movement. Together, the panel offered sharp insights into the plural and contested meanings of “the people” in contemporary democratic struggles.

 

Panel 7 — ‘The People’ in Schröndinger’s Box: Democracy Alive and Dead

In 2025, democracy occupies a state of superposition—at once vibrant and eroding, plural and polarized, legal and lawless. Panel 7 exposed this paradox with precision: democracy is not a fixed ideal but a shifting terrain, where power is contested through law, ritual, narrative, and strategy. Whether it survives or collapses depends on how it is interpreted, performed, and defended. The Schrödinger’s box is cracked open, but its contents are not predetermined. As Robert Person warned, authoritarian actors exploit democratic vulnerabilities; as Max Steuer and Justin Attard showed, those vulnerabilities also reveal possibilities for renewal. We are not neutral observers—we are agents within the experiment. Democracy’s future hinges on our will to intervene.

 

Panel 8 — ‘The People’ vs ‘The Elite’: A New Global Order?

Panel 8 offered a rich exploration of populism, elite transformation, and democratic erosion. Co-chaired by Ashley Wright (Oxford) and Azize Sargın (ECPS), the session featured cutting-edge scholarship from Aviezer Tucker, Pınar Dokumacı, Attila Antal, and Murat Aktaş. Presentations spanned elite populism, feminist spatial resistance, transatlantic authoritarianism, and the metapolitics of the French New Right. Discussant Karen Horn (University of Erfurt) offered incisive critiques on intellectual transmission, rationalism, and democratic thresholds. Together, the panel underscored populism’s global diffusion and its capacity to reshape both elites and “the people,” demanding renewed theoretical and civic engagement. Democracy, the panel emphasized, remains a contested space—never static, always in motion.

 

Roundtable III — When the Social Contract is Broken: How to Put the Genie Back

Roundtable 3 explored how broken social contracts have fueled populism and democratic disillusionment. The session featured Selçuk Gültaşlı’s summary of Eric Beinhocker’s fairness-based model of democratic collapse, Dr. Aviezer Tucker’s critique of elite entrenchment, Lord Alderdice’s focus on emotional wounds like humiliation and disillusionment, and Professor Julian F. Müller’s call for conceptual clarity around populism. Concluding the session, Irina von Wiese grounded abstract theory in lived inequality and called for renewed trust, dignity, and participation. The panel made clear: rebuilding democracy requires more than policy—it demands empathy, fairness, and respect for those left behind.

Demonstrators at The People’s March, an evolution of the Women’s March, NYC, January 18, 2025. A protester holds a sign reading “Presidents Are Not Kings.” Photo: Erin Alexis Randolph.

Professor Friedman: We Need to Recognize That the Older Democratic Model Is Being Rejected

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeInterviews

In this wide-ranging interview with the ECPS, Professor Steven Friedman critiques dominant liberal democratic paradigms that prioritize constraining state power while ignoring the dangers of unregulated private power. “Private power exists and poses significant challenges,” he argues. Professor Friedman warns against the myth that today’s authoritarian surge simply threatens well-functioning democracies, pointing instead to the alienation of citizens by systems failing to meet their needs. He also critiques the hypocrisy of the so-called “rules-based international order,” emphasizing that “if we do not have international law that applies equally to everyone, then we do not have international law at all.” For Friedman, democratic renewal must address inequality and defend universal principles of participation and inclusion.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In this interview conducted for the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Steven Friedman, Research Professor in Politics at the University of Johannesburg, offers a rigorous critique of prevailing liberal democratic paradigms and their limitations in addressing structural inequalities, especially in postcolonial contexts such as South Africa. While affirming his commitment to democracy, Professor Friedman challenges the tendency among many scholars and policymakers to frame the current authoritarian surge as a simple rupture in otherwise well-functioning democracies. As he puts it: “We need to recognize that statements like the one we signed have become necessary precisely because that older model of democracy is being rejected—not primarily by converts to authoritarianism, but by citizens alienated by a democratic system that failed to respond to their needs.”

A central theme in Professor Friedman’s analysis is the narrow theoretical focus of dominant democratic models, which historically have prioritized constraining state power while neglecting the role of concentrated private economic power in undermining democracy. “Private power exists and poses significant challenges,” he observes. “If we fail to regulate private power, we end up with today’s reality: vast concentrations of economic power in the hands of a few individuals.”This critique resonates powerfully in South Africa, where democracy has unfolded in conditions of stark inequality deeply rooted in racialized histories of dispossession.

Professor Friedman also reflects critically on South Africa’s place in global debates about authoritarian populism, noting that local authoritarian trends often imitate those in the global North—particularly xenophobic politics centered on immigration—even though they arise from different historical trajectories. He emphasizes that this mimicry, combined with a homegrown narrative that dismisses constitutional democracy as a Western imposition, has created fertile ground for anti-democratic forces. Professor Friedman warns against this false equivalence: “Democracy is for everyone. It is not just for white Western people.”

In addition, Professor Friedman interrogates the concept of the “rules-based international order,” a central theme in liberal internationalism. While acknowledging that breaches of international law—such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—are serious, he argues that the real problem is the hypocrisy of this order’s application: “In Africa, as elsewhere in the global South, the suspicion is not that we do not need a rules-based order, but that the rules only apply to some.” He draws on personal experience of apartheid South Africa to highlight the corrosive effects of legal double standards, concluding that “if we do not have international law that applies equally to everyone, then we do not have international law at all.”

Throughout the conversation, Professor Friedman underscores the responsibilities of intellectuals in confronting both authoritarian populism and the failures of democratic systems themselves. He insists that defending democracy today requires scholars and public intellectuals not only to protect constitutional principles but also to advocate for a more inclusive, participatory model that recognizes and addresses entrenched inequalities—particularly those shaped by private economic power.

By foregrounding these themes, this ECPS interview invites a broader rethinking of how we understand authoritarian threats globally and how democratic renewal must involve far more than defending electoral institutions: it must include grappling with the material inequalities that undermine democratic legitimacy.

Dr. Steven Friedman is Research Professor in Politics at the University of Johannesburg.

Here is the transcript of our interview with Professor Steven Friedman, edited lightly for readability.

Decolonization Means Adding Voices from the Global South, Not Excluding the North

Professor Steven Friedman, thank you so very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: As a signatory to the declaration published on June 13, 2025, which invokes the history of 1925 Italy to characterize contemporary authoritarian populism globally, how persuasive do you find this analogy for understanding authoritarian threats in postcolonial contexts such as South Africa—particularly in the light of your own critique of applying Northern paradigms to Southern democracies?

Professor Steven Friedman: Before I answer directly, just a word about that critique you mentioned. What I’m trying to do in that critique is not close down but open up. In other words, I don’t want to be misunderstood as one of those voices who say, “We don’t want to learn anything from the global North; only what happens in the global South matters.” And then you get a whole lot of essentialism about what is really, authentically African or Asian, or whatever the case may be. My concern has always been that a particular way of thinking and a particular experience has been foisted on the rest of us, but that certainly doesn’t mean that experience is irrelevant. I wrote a long article a couple of years ago on decolonization, in which I made the point that decolonization was not about excluding voices from the global North—it was about adding voices from the global South to those voices. 

So, as you correctly say, fascism was an Italian experience about a century ago. But it’s an experience which is relevant for us today. We are passing through a moment globally where the extinguishing or severe weakening of existing democracies is certainly a global concern at the moment, on all continents. And therefore that it’s appropriate. It happened to be enforced around the anniversary of the Intellectuals’ Declaration. But I don’t think the fact that it happened in Italy in the 1920s excludes the possibility that it speaks to a reality today which affects us just as it affects everybody else. 

Scholars Must Engage in Public Debate

The declaration calls on intellectuals, artists, and scholars to “act” as a bulwark against authoritarianism. From your perspective on intellectual responsibility in transitional societies, what forms of scholarly engagement are most ethically and politically effective in confronting democratic erosion today?

Professor Steven Friedman: I think just one point: it was probably quite normal to talk about us as transitional societies 10 or 15 years ago. Today, I’m not quite sure that’s appropriate, because I think right now, just about everywhere is a transitional society.
We’re at a moment in which those certainties—which, as you correctly point out, I’ve written and criticized a great deal—that idea that there are democracies that have “made it” and democracies that are still “trying to make it,” that there are democracies that are secure and democracies that are not secure, all of that is no longer appropriate. There are very few places in the world—Costa Rica and Botswana spring to mind—that probably aren’t under great threat at the moment. But it’s a problem just about everywhere else. Therefore, what I’m going to say applies generally. 

I think it’s very important—though this may sound trite but is often forgotten—that scholars and intellectuals cannot play their role from the classroom or the library alone. They have to be willing to engage in the public debate. And once engaged, they must carefully consider key strategic questions: Are you talking down to people? Are you saying things that seem insensitive to their circumstances? Are you assuming that because you’ve read many books and they haven’t, you are superior? It’s crucial to participate in public debate in ways that open conversations rather than close them down. Too often, intellectuals are guilty of saying, “Yes, of course I participated; I explained to them why they were all wrong and I was right.” You don’t need a psychology degree to see how that’s going to offend people.

I also think it’s important for intellectuals to engage—let me phrase this carefully—with citizens’ organizations and citizens themselves. I certainly don’t mean becoming an uncritical messenger for everything a particular organization or group says, but it’s essential to keep channels open and remain available for dialogue. I’m not suggesting that intellectuals have unlimited influence; I’m well aware of the limits of their role. But we shouldn’t underestimate their impact either. One can move from the illusion of having more power than one actually does to the equally misguided belief that only material power matters and ideas don’t—which I don’t think is true.

Evidence and Argument Are More Essential Than Ever

A key theme of the declaration is the defense of “facts and evidence” in a climate of disinformation. Given your critique of how elite-driven narratives often delegitimize popular grievances, how can intellectuals defend epistemic rigor without reinforcing social exclusion or epistemic inequality?

Professor Steven Friedman: My critique of these narratives stems precisely from their disregard for evidence and argument. If they accurately reflected empirical realities, I would have little cause to criticize them. What one often encounters, however, is the repetition of entrenched prejudices, presented as if they were grounded in evidence and argument.

In the field of democracy studies, for instance, a striking example is the paradigm of democratic consolidation—a concept that was highly influential and arguably remains so, even if the term is now invoked less frequently. I have written extensively on this topic because, for many years, scholars researched, wrote, and published on democratic consolidation as though its meaning were self-evident and its foundations empirically robust.

Yet, when I subjected this concept to detailed critical scrutiny some years ago, I discovered something remarkable: despite its prominence, it had never been coherently defined. To illustrate, at one point some eminent scholars claimed that “democracy is consolidated when it’s the only game in town.” But if you examine that carefully, it’s an extremely vague, untestable notion of how to determine whether a democracy is consolidated.

So I think it is important to emphasize that while much of my work critiques the imposition of global North perspectives, this should never be taken to imply that evidence and argument are unimportant. On the contrary, it underscores that evidence and argument are more essential than ever. We must remain vigilant to the extent to which conventional wisdom—particularly the orthodoxies that dominate the academy—are not grounded in evidence and argument.

Indeed, I would contend that all my critiques of what some call Western or global North bias have fundamentally been arguments in favor of rigorously applying evidence and argument. I see no contradiction in this position.

This is a particularly pressing concern today. I do not subscribe to the view that digital media—and I deliberately use the term “digital media” rather than “social media,” which I regard as an odd label for large, well-resourced corporations marketing products—possess an extraordinary, autonomous power to transform our lives. Rather, what is transforming our lives is that these media amplify preexisting prejudices and misrepresentations.

Centuries ago, people burned women as witches, based on rumors very similar to the misrepresentations we encounter today. But those tended to spread in small, localized communities. Today, you can put a lie into the world and reach millions of people within minutes. That is a tremendous challenge, and it’s a challenge everywhere. But I certainly don’t think the problem lies in evidence and argument being culturally biased. Quite the contrary—the cultural biases we face tend to eliminate or weaken evidence and argument.

Participation Must Be Continuous

Thousands of protesters march for social justice and women’s rights in Atlanta, January 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration. Protest signs rise above the crowd. Photo: Dreamstime.

The declaration warns against authoritarian leaders claiming an “unlimited popular mandate.” In your scholarship, you’ve emphasized democratizing participation rather than limiting it—how would you suggest navigating the tension between majoritarian legitimacy and the protection of pluralism?

Professor Steven Friedman: Majoritarianism tends to exclude public participation. To put it bluntly, that is precisely what’s wrong with it: majoritarian populism asserts, “We won an election, so we have an unlimited mandate to do whatever we like for the next five years.” In some cases, of course, they manipulate the system to ensure that their rule lasts far longer than five years. At present, in the United States—a case that understandably concerns many around the world—we see a situation where a president who, let us recall, did not win a majority of the popular vote in a system where the popular vote does not determine the winner, nonetheless claims an overwhelming mandate to disregard constitutional constraints.

In my work, I have consistently emphasized that one of the key reasons we need participation is precisely because electoral mandates are inherently limited. I have argued—though this is by no means an original observation—that in multi-party democracies, very few voters agree with every position their chosen party advances. Most citizens select the party that most closely aligns with their preferences but do not endorse its entire platform. Therefore, no party can assume that any specific policy or legislative initiative enjoys popular support simply because it won an election. That support must be demonstrated and actively sought—this is precisely where the principle of participation begins.

The problem with majoritarianism, which the declaration rightly rejects, is not the familiar cliché of the “tyranny of the majority.” The problem is elites claiming that an electoral mandate gives them a blank check to determine what becomes law. Moreover, given the nature of electoral cycles—even in countries where elections are held every two years—a great deal can happen between elections. Governments frequently face circumstances that did not exist at the time voters cast their ballots, so they cannot plausibly claim a mandate to act in those situations.

One of the key points I have long stressed—and why I found that part of the declaration so appropriate—is that we need rules, we need constitutions, and we need power to be subject to constraints. When power is unconstrained, it inevitably acts as it pleases. History shows that utopian democratic experiments without rules tend to become authoritarian very quickly.

The Real Danger Is Alienation from a Democracy

In equating today’s far-right movements with “fascism,” is there a danger of universalizing European historical experiences at the expense of recognizing the structural drivers of discontent in contexts of ongoing inequality, such as South Africa and other postcolonial states?

Professor Steven Friedman: There are certainly dangers, and I think you’ve identified something important here. In itself, I don’t see a problem—as I noted earlier—because by signing a statement that refers to fascism, neither I nor anyone else is suggesting that only the European experience of a century ago is instructive. Rather, we are acknowledging it as one instructive historical experience.

The danger you highlight lies in the framing: that what we are witnessing today is often understood—particularly by many mainstream scholars—as an intrusion upon democracies that had supposedly been serving their citizens well. That assumption, I believe, is widespread but profoundly problematic.

I would argue strongly—and you rightly highlight inequality, which is central to my concerns—that these democracies were not, in fact, adequately serving their citizens. To be clear, I would not have signed the statement if I did not believe democracy is worth defending. But what we are witnessing now is, unfortunately, a challenge posed by anti-democrats, not by more engaged democrats. This challenge emerges against the backdrop of an attenuated form of democracy—one that failed to address people’s needs. It was a thinner version of democracy than the postwar models in the global North, which incorporated stronger constraints on private power.

At a theoretical level, this dominant democratic model focused solely on constraining the relationship between citizen and state, while largely ignoring private power. Yet private power exists and poses significant challenges. If we fail to regulate private power, we end up with today’s reality: vast concentrations of economic power in the hands of a few individuals.

This is not an inevitable feature of democracy. Postwar European societies—even conservative models like Germany’s social market economy—recognized the need to constrain private power. When Elon Musk can spend $250 million to influence a US election in favor of Donald Trump, this reflects a model of democracy that accepts influence as legitimate as long as it is directed at the state, without demanding constraints on private concentrations of power.

One important but under-discussed finding from recent US elections illustrates this point: Democratic Party candidates who campaigned on platforms addressing private power—through competition policy, price regulation, or related measures—performed about eight percentage points better than those who did not. This helps explain otherwise puzzling outcomes, such as Democratic victories in certain Midwestern states despite national Republican dominance. Those candidates were speaking directly to popular concerns about inequality and economic insecurity.

So, to return to your question: the real danger of invoking this model uncritically is that it encourages a simplistic narrative—“we had a good democracy, and now bad people are threatening it.” We need to recognize that statements like the one we signed have become necessary precisely because that older model of democracy is being rejected—not primarily by converts to authoritarianism, but by citizens alienated by a democratic system that failed to respond to their needs.

Another myth I’m concerned about is the claim that large numbers of people are suddenly embracing authoritarian or anti-democratic ideas. In most countries, this is not what is happening. More prominent is the phenomenon of citizens who value democracy but feel so alienated by its attenuated form that they no longer participate.

This connects back to the issue of majoritarianism. The problem is not, as some critiques suggest, an illiberal mass dictating to a liberal elite. The real problem is that citizens who would strongly support a robust democracy feel unheard, alienated, and excluded from meaningful participation. 

To return to the recent US election—a key reference point because of its global resonance—the Republicans didn’t win; the Democrats lost. Nineteen million voters who had supported the Democrats in 2020 did not vote in this election. This reflects profound discontent among potential supporters of democracy itself. If we fail to acknowledge this, then democracy is in even more trouble than we already recognize.

International Law That Applies Unequally Is No Law at All

The Hague, Netherlands — February 14, 2018: Entrance sign of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the ICC building. Photo: Robert Paul Van Beets.

The declaration’s robust defense of multilateralism aligns with a liberal internationalist vision. How should scholars reconcile this with postcolonial critiques of global governance institutions as sites of inequality and dependency, particularly from an African vantage point?

Professor Steven Friedman: From any vantage point, the problem is not that liberal internationalism—if we want to call it that; it’s as good a name as any—is a bad idea. The problem is that it has largely been honored in the breach: it is often invoked but rarely practiced.

This connects to another myth we should interrogate today: the notion that anti-democrats alone are responsible for tearing up the international order. In fact, part of the reason they are doing so is because the self-proclaimed elite democrats undermined that order long ago.

So, when Russia invades Ukraine, we hear that this is a breach of the “rules-based international order.” And indeed, if such an order truly functioned, it would be a serious breach. But the issue is not that anything Russia did was justified—it was not. The issue is the double standard.

Beyond the oft-made point that, apparently, in the rules-based order it is permissible to bomb civilians if they happen to be Palestinian, there is the fact that when Putin decimated Grozny in Chechnya—full of Russian Muslims—the international order was silent. When Russian forces bombed Aleppo into rubble, again, there was no response. Only when Putin attacked white Europeans did the “rules-based order” suddenly become important.

In Africa, as elsewhere in the global South, the suspicion is not that we do not need a rules-based order, but that the rules only apply to some. A specific and highly relevant example is the International Criminal Court (ICC). In principle, an international court that intervenes when states fail to prosecute human rights abuses is an excellent idea. But until very recently, the ICC was used almost exclusively to prosecute Africans. There was one notable exception—Bosnia and the prosecution of figures such as Radovan Karadžić—but overwhelmingly, the focus was on Africa, despite abundant evidence of war crimes elsewhere. And now, as the ICC attempts to fulfill its intended role more broadly, that effort is frustrated. When the Court issues arrest warrants for individuals favored by Northern elites, it faces sanctions. For instance, when the ICC indicted Israeli and Hamas figures, it was widely reported that a prominent politician remarked that the ICC “is only for Africans and thugs like Putin.”

This underscores a very basic point I have made many times: if you or I lived in a country where the law clearly applied to some people but not to others, we would consider that unacceptable. I speak from personal experience—before 1994, I lived in a country where there was one law for some people and another for others. Fortunately, after sustained international pressure, that system was deemed intolerable.

So, I was quite happy to sign a statement acknowledging that the international rules-based order is in trouble, because I believe it is in more than trouble. But not all signatories would agree on what precisely the problem is or how it should be addressed. My own view is simple: if we do not have international law that applies equally to everyone, then we do not have international law at all. It’s a straightforward proposition.

Authoritarian Populism in South Africa Imitates Northern Patterns

Lastly Professor Friedman, do you see a distinctively South African form of authoritarian populism emerging today? If so, how would you differentiate it analytically from global trends, given your emphasis on the rootedness of South African democratic struggles in racial and economic inequality?

Professor Steven Friedman: Yes, it’s a significant problem here today. Let me first say something more about this issue of global experiences and the influence of particular ideas and ways of seeing the world. A few years ago, I wrote a book on COVID-19, arguing that South Africa failed to deal effectively with the pandemic because we insisted on responding in exactly the same way as the US and Europe, despite the fact that those countries had some of the highest infection and fatality rates globally. It would have seemed far more rational to look at countries like South Korea, which had far lower rates. The broader point is that much of the discourse in South Africa simply repeats what is said in the global North, and that has profound influence on local thinking.

As a result, much of the authoritarian populism we now face imitates Northern patterns, despite arising in a very different environment. A clear example is immigration. As in many parts of the global North, hostility to immigration has become a major threat to democracy in South Africa. Anecdotally, I was invited to speak at the Human Rights Commission and noted to the audience that during the 20-minute drive to the event, I heard xenophobic attacks on immigrants roughly 30 times on talk radio. Even unrelated issues were immediately framed as problems caused by “foreign nationals.” This xenophobia is particularly bizarre in our context, given that the difference between a South African and a Zimbabwean is often simply which side of a colonial border drawn at the Berlin Conference they happen to have been born on.

This underscores a point I have made repeatedly: many of the Northern attitudes of superiority I criticize are absorbed and internalized by people in the global South, as we see here in the xenophobic discourse.

Another feature of South African authoritarian populism that mirrors global patterns is the deep cynicism toward government. Uniquely, in South Africa today, one is considered “brave” for even mildly defending the government. About 30% of the population—those most visible in political debate—express pervasive hostility to government. While a critical citizenry is generally preferable to a compliant one, in our context this cynicism is weaponized by anti-democrats.

Democracy Is Not a Western Construct — It Is for Everyone

Two queues of people at a polling station during the 2011 general elections in Zambia. Photo: Dreamstime.

Our official opposition party currently campaigns on a platform that explicitly seeks to abolish the Constitution, precisely because they object to the democratic freedoms it enshrines. Given widespread cynicism, anti-democratic actors know that if they wish to undermine a democratic politician, they need only make corruption allegations—regardless of whether they are true—because public discourse will presume their truth.

A current example illustrates this: a senior police officer recently held a press conference alleging widespread corruption among politicians and judges, naming only two individuals: the Minister of Police (a leading pro-constitution figure) and a senior police officer at odds with the populist president. The President announced a commission of inquiry to investigate the claims, but was pilloried for doing so; the public narrative suggests that the allegations themselves suffice to prove guilt. This creates fertile ground for anti-democrats: all they need to do is make accusations to damage democratic figures.

Another dimension of authoritarian populism in South Africa is the misuse of anti-imperialist rhetoric. The opposition party argues that the Constitution itself is a Western imperialist imposition—that the rule of law and democratic accountability are inventions of Western elites designed to enslave Africans. This is a deeply problematic claim that must be confronted.

I have consistently argued that democracy is not a Western or white construct. Certain core democratic principles are universal. I define democracy, rather idealistically, as a society in which every adult has an equal say in every decision affecting them. While no such society has ever existed, this provides a normative standard that clearly transcends any particular culture or geography: democracy, properly understood, cannot be exclusively white or Western because it affirms the equal right of all individuals to participate in decision-making.

This argument must be won here in South Africa because there is a persistent refrain that democracy was imposed by the West and that abandoning democracy would somehow liberate us. Just to be anecdotal again, because I think it illustrates the point: I have served for several years on an awards committee that recognizes outstanding Africans. Recently, I had a major debate with my colleagues because they wanted to give an award to a man who had staged a military coup. I was in the minority, but I said, “I don’t care how fine his speeches are—if he staged a military coup, he is out of the question.” In the end, they accepted the point.

What I found striking was that my colleagues are not right-wing, authoritarian populists by any means. The reason they wanted to give him the award was precisely because he claimed he sought to free his country from Western influence.

This reflects the idea—widespread here—that being anti-democratic is somehow authentically African. It is something we must resist. I believe the way to resist it is to insist, consistently, that democracy is for everyone. It is not just for white Western people.

Robert Huber is Professor of Political Science Methods at the University of Salzburg.

ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 – Prof. Robert Huber: Populist Narratives on Sustainability, Energy Resources and Climate Change

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In his lecture at the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, Professor Robert Huber examined how populist parties across Europe construct climate skepticism, emphasizing that populism’s “thin-centered ideology” (as defined by Cas Mudde) pits “the pure people” against “corrupt elites.” This framing makes climate science and policy institutions prime targets for populist critique. Professor Huber’s expert survey of 31 European countries showed a clear trend: the more populist a party, the more skeptical it is of climate policy and climate science, regardless of its left- or right-wing orientation. He cautioned participants to disentangle populism from related ideologies like nationalism or authoritarianism, underscoring that populism’s challenge to climate politics is complex, context-dependent, and shaped by deeper struggles over legitimacy, authority, and representation.

Reported by ECPS Staff

The ninth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, titled “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders,” was held online from July 7 to 11, 2025. On Friday, July 11, Professor Robert Huber delivered his lecture on “Populist Narratives on Sustainability, Energy Resources and Climate Change,” offering participants a rigorous exploration of the complex intersections between populist politics and climate discourse.

The Summer School convened scholars, students, and practitioners from around the world to engage in critical discussions about how populism shapes—and is shaped by—the politics of climate change. It provided a unique interdisciplinary forum to analyze these global dynamics and to develop policy-relevant insights for stakeholders navigating the overlapping crises of climate and democracy.

The session was moderated by Dr. Susana Batel, Assistant Researcher and Invited Lecturer at the University Institute of Lisbon’s Center for Psychological Research and Social Intervention. Dr. Batel’s own research focuses on the green transition and its relationship to socio-environmental justice, exploring how climate and energy policies may reproduce or challenge entrenched social inequalities. More recently, she has turned her attention to the relationship between green transition efforts and far-right populism, particularly in Portugal. In her introduction, Dr. Batel underscored the relevance of Professor Huber’s expertise for these pressing questions, noting that his work has become central to ongoing debates on how populist actors respond to climate policies and narratives.

Dr. Robert Huber is Professor of Political Science Methods at the University of Salzburg. His research expertise lies at the intersection of populism, political methodology, and climate politics, and he has become a leading figure in the emerging field studying how populist parties and leaders engage with environmental and energy issues. As Dr. Batel observed in her remarks, Professor Huber has helped illuminate how populist actors contest not only the facts of climate change but also the legitimacy of the processes through which climate policy is made and implemented.

In his lecture, Professor Huber tackled the core question of why populists, both on the right and left, have often adopted a skeptical or adversarial stance toward climate action. He emphasized the importance of distinguishing populism from adjacent ideological forces such as nationalism, authoritarianism, or economic liberalism, arguing that only careful conceptual and empirical work can reveal the mechanisms through which populism interacts with climate skepticism. His lecture offered participants a comprehensive framework to understand the diversity of populist climate narratives, setting the stage for deeper discussion and analysis of this timely and globally significant phenomenon.

Why Populists Target Climate Issues

Installation of Donald Trump’s head by artist Jacques Rival floating on the Moselle River, Metz, France, August 31, 2019. Photo: Kateryna Levchenko.

In his lecture, Professor Huber provided a rigorous and insightful analysis of why populist actors engage with climate issues, highlighting the complexity and nuance often overlooked in popular discussions. Professor Huber opened his talk by reflecting on the emerging nature of this research agenda, noting, “When I started studying populism and climate change back in 2016, there was not much on that—very little research and few opportunities to think about how these two pressing societal issues intersect.”His remarks underscored both the novelty of the topic and the importance of its exploration.

Professor Huber’s central inquiry revolved around understanding the mechanisms through which populist parties and leaders construct skepticism toward climate action. He acknowledged that figures such as Donald Trump inevitably dominate discussions of climate populism, citing one of Trump’s early tweets: “NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?” While this is a classic example of conflating weather with climate, Professor Huber emphasized that such rhetoric also reflects broader concerns about public spending and government priorities.

To illustrate variation within populist climate skepticism, Professor Huber turned to European populists, including Thierry Baudet, the leader of the Dutch radical-right party Forum for Democracy. Baudet framed climate action as futile and wasteful, complaining that billions were being spent “just to decrease global warming by 0.007 degrees,” which he characterized as “madness.” Similarly, Marcel de Graaff, formerly a member of the European Parliament, attacked EU climate policy as deceitful, claiming that elites benefited financially from “green lies.” Professor Huber observed that while all three cases reflect skepticism toward climate action, they differ in emphasis—Trump’s framing centered on economic competitiveness, Baudet on policy effectiveness, and de Graaff on political betrayal. 

These examples led Professor Huber to ask the central question driving his lecture: “Why is it that populist politicians are so often skeptical about climate change?” He insisted that an analytical approach is required to move beyond anecdote and description, seeking instead to understand underlying patterns and causal mechanisms.

Professor Huber introduced the audience to Van Rensburg’s (2015) typology of climate skepticism, which distinguishes between skepticism about the evidence (whether climate change is real and human-caused), the process (whether decision-making and knowledge-production are legitimate), and the response (whether proposed policies are desirable). While populists may sometimes question the reality of climate change itself, Professor Huber suggested that their skepticism more often targets the process and response dimensions—expressing distrust toward scientific expertise, democratic legitimacy, and the distributive impacts of climate policy.

A particularly vivid example of this process skepticism emerged from the “Yellow Vests” protests in France, where demonstrators opposed carbon taxes not only for their economic burden but also because they perceived climate policy as undemocratic and detached from ordinary people’s needs. Professor Huber noted how one protester’s sign declared: “I want my democracy now,” reflecting the sentiment that climate decisions are made by remote technocratic elites without sufficient public input. As Professor Huber remarked, “For some people, climate policy really feels out of touch with their everyday needs.”

Professor Huber emphasized that much of this skepticism appears on the political right but cautioned against equating populism with right-wing ideology. “It may just be that they are right-wing,” he observed, highlighting that climate skepticism among populists could stem from other ideological commitments—such as nationalism, conservatism, or libertarianism—that overlap but are analytically distinct from populism itself.

Nonetheless, Professor Huber acknowledged that left-wing populism can also intersect with climate discourse in distinct ways. He pointed to emerging instances of “green populism” on the left, where actors such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon or Podemos in Spain critique climate policies for failing to address social inequalities or for being captured by corporate interests. Professor Huber explained, “Recent examples suggest that left-wing populists may foster a pro-climate populism that emphasizes social justice and corporate accountability.”

Huber structured his presentation around three guiding questions:

  1. What features of climate change and climate politics make them attractive targets for populist narratives?
  2. Are populists systematically different from non-populists in their climate attitudes?
  3. What recurring patterns can we identify in the narratives that populists employ when discussing climate issues?

He emphasized that populist climate skepticism should be understood as multifaceted and context-dependent. In Western Europe, outright denial of climate science (so-called “trend skepticism”) is rare; more commonly, populists challenge the legitimacy of scientific expertise, international institutions, and the distributive fairness of climate policies. Professor Huber summarized this dynamic: “What we often see is that populists are not necessarily denying climate change itself—they are contesting who makes the decisions and who pays the price.”

However, Professor Huber urged his audience to avoid conflating populism with far-right ideology and to disentangle populism’s distinctive contributions to climate skepticism from other ideological factors. He called for systematic, empirically grounded research that recognizes the diversity of populist climate narratives while remaining attentive to their common thread: a distrust of elites and a framing of climate policy as a battleground between “the pure people” and “corrupt elites.”

Theoretical Explanations for the Populism–Climate Link

 

Then, Professor Huber delved into the theoretical underpinnings that help explain why populist actors so often engage in climate skepticism. He posed a central question: “What is it essentially about populism that links it to climate change?” His objective was not only to describe the phenomenon but also to dissect its causal mechanisms, emphasizing the need to distinguish populism from overlapping ideologies like nationalism or authoritarianism.

Professor Huber began by outlining three principal ways of conceptualizing populism, noting that each offers different implications for understanding populist positions on climate change.

The first perspective defines populism as a political strategy. Drawing on the work of Kurt Weyland, Professor Huber explained that this approach sees populism as a mode of leadership in which a charismatic leader builds “direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of unorganized masses.” This definition, more prevalent in Latin America, highlights the personalistic and anti-institutional nature of populist movements. However, as Professor Huber observed, “this kind of definition doesn’t contain much information about how populist leaders should think about climate change,” suggesting that skepticism in this context may arise from opportunistic attempts to mobilize supporters rather than a core ideological stance.

The second conceptualization frames populism as a political style, a view associated with scholars such as Benjamin Moffitt. Here, populism is performative: it relies on provocation, transgression, and signaling difference from mainstream elites. Populists may adopt a combative tone or deliberately violate elite norms as a way of connecting with “the people.” According to Professor Huber, this style is often visible in populist climate rhetoric, where actors deny climate science not necessarily because they disbelieve it, but as a way of “demonstrating that one is different… to distance themselves from the mainstream elite.” He offered the example of Boris Johnson’s disheveled appearance as a performative signal of outsider status, adding that similar tactics are evident when populists question the legitimacy or value of climate action.

The third and most analytically productive definition, according to Professor Huber, treats populism as an ideology or a thin-centered set of ideas that divides society into two antagonistic groups: the pure people and the corrupt elites. This binary worldview, he noted, is key to understanding the climate-populism link. Populists “excel at framing politics as a struggle between good and evil,” and thus are predisposed to portray climate elites—whether scientists, international organizations, or bureaucrats—as self-serving actors imposing policies that harm ordinary citizens. As Professor Huber explained, “It’s here where we can most clearly see how populism might shape climate skepticism: elites are seen as either failing to implement climate action or doing so at the expense of the people.”

However, Professor Huber emphasized that many factors commonly associated with populism are distinct causal forces that must not be conflated with populism itself. “We often fall into the trap of saying populism and meaning the far right,” he warned, underscoring the importance of disentangling populism from other ideological dimensions such as authoritarianism, nationalism, or economic left-right positions. For example, he noted that nationalist skepticism toward international climate agreements arises not from populist anti-elitism but from a preference for national sovereignty. Similarly, authoritarian discomfort with lifestyle changes required by climate action (e.g., promoting veganism) stems from a rigid adherence to tradition, not necessarily from populist ideology.

Professor Huber also observed that left-wing populists might oppose climate policy from a different ideological position: they may view climate measures as economically regressive or damaging to the working class. Thus, left-wing and right-wing populist critiques of climate policy differ in content but share a populist framing that pits “the people” against elites.

Moreover, Professor Huber called for analytic precision in research on populism and climate politics: “We need to disentangle what is populism and what are other things that are related to populism but are not necessarily the same thing.” His careful mapping of different conceptualizations and mechanisms underscored the value of distinguishing populism from adjacent ideologies when explaining its impact on climate discourse—a message of particular relevance for scholars seeking to understand the heterogeneity of populist climate narratives.

Empirical Evidence: The Expert Survey

During his lecture, Professor Huber also presented original empirical findings from an expert survey he conducted with two colleagues across 31 European countries. The survey, fielded in 2023, sought to provide systematic insights into how populism relates to political parties’ climate positions, shifting the discussion from anecdotal observations to measurable patterns.

Professor Huber began by stressing the survey’s scope and methodology. He explained that experts—primarily political science scholars—were asked to rate the degree of populism and the climate positions of parties in their own countries. The goal was to move beyond speeches and manifestos to capture a broader and more nuanced reputational assessment of where parties stand. “This is not an absolute measure of where parties stand, but rather what experts think where this party stands,” he clarified, noting that reputational measures offer insight into parties’ perceived orientations while acknowledging their limitations in detecting recent or subtle shifts.

Populism in the survey was operationalized through a widely used definition: attitudes towards elites, attitudes towards “the people,” and belief in a unified popular will. For climate positions, the survey asked about two dimensions: (1) the extent to which parties prioritized long-term climate gains over short-term socioeconomic costs, and (2) whether parties supported a stronger role for climate science in policymaking. These two questions, he explained, were designed to tap into different aspects of skepticism: what he termed “response skepticism” (about policies) and “process skepticism”(about science and institutions).

Professor Huber then turned to the findings. Presenting a scatterplot, he pointed out that “the more populist parties get, the more climate-skeptic they get in terms of not supporting climate policy.” A clear downward-sloping trend line indicated a negative relationship between degree of populism and support for climate action. This pattern was echoed when looking at parties’ support for the role of climate science: populist parties tended to express greater skepticism about scientific expertise, too.

However, a more granular analysis yielded even more striking insights. When Professor Huber divided parties into three ideological families—left, center, and right—he found that in all groups, increased populism correlated with greater climate skepticism. “What I find quite stunning,” he remarked, “and what runs a bit against this narrative of left-wing populist parties being a force for climate action, is that in all three groups we see a negative slope.” In other words, while right-wing populist parties were the most skeptical overall, even left-wing populists displayed less enthusiasm for climate action than their non-populist counterparts on the left.

This nuanced finding complicates common assumptions that left-populists are natural allies of ambitious climate policy. Professor Huber acknowledged that this pattern might partly reflect comparisons between left-populist parties and strongly pro-climate Green parties, but insisted it was a meaningful result nonetheless: “On average, left-wing populist parties are not that much more progressive when it comes to climate action than conservative or centrist parties that are not populist.”

Turning to right-wing populist parties, Professor Huber observed that these were the most skeptical of climate policy and science, but emphasized that this reflected their right-wing ideological orientation as much as their populism. “That’s not the effect of populism—that’s the effect of left-right orientation,” he cautioned, reiterating a key theme of his lecture: the need to disentangle populism from adjacent ideological factors such as authoritarianism, nationalism, or economic liberalism.

Professor Huber also reflected on the broader literature, acknowledging a “Western Europe focus” in both his own data and much existing research. He pointed out that this geographic concentration raises questions about generalizability, noting, for example, that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi represents a case that does not fit typical European populist patterns.

To illustrate how populist narratives manifest in practice, Professor Huber concluded by revisiting some familiar and varied examples. Tweets by Donald Trump highlighted skepticism framed around economic competitiveness and confusion between weather and climate. French Yellow Vest protesters exemplified resistance to climate policies perceived as unfair to working-class citizens, captured in the now-famous phrase “end of the world vs. end of the month.” Meanwhile, left-wing populists like Bernie Sanders and Spain’s Podemos criticized elites for blocking strong climate action—what Professor Huber termed “pro-climate populist frames.” However, he cautioned that such pro-climate populism remains relatively rare empirically. “Empirically, as the expert survey data shows, we don’t see this that often—it seems to be more isolated,” he concluded.

Professor Huber’s closing reflections emphasized the complexity of the populism-climate relationship. Populism’s “thin-centered” nature allows it to take multiple forms—right, left, pro-climate, or anti-climate—depending on context and adjacent ideologies. The task for scholars, he urged, is to avoid simplistic conflations and instead carefully disentangle the multiple drivers behind populist parties’ climate positions: “There is a lot of variation, and we need to systematically analyze this and disentangle the different underlying reasons for these narratives and frames.”

Conclusion

Professor Robert Huber’s lecture offered participants of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 a deeply analytical and empirically grounded understanding of the complex relationship between populism and climate politics. His key contribution was to disentangle populism from adjacent ideologies—such as nationalism, authoritarianism, and economic left-right positioning—insisting on analytical precision when examining why populist actors often exhibit climate skepticism.

Importantly, drawing on the work of Cas Mudde, Professor Huber distinguished populism as a “thin-centered ideology” that frames politics as a moral struggle between the “pure people” and “corrupt elites,” providing fertile ground for contesting the legitimacy of climate science, policy processes, and institutions. Populism’s anti-elitist orientation predisposes it to target those perceived as technocratic or detached from “the people,” such as climate scientists, international organizations, and bureaucratic policymakers. However, as Professor Huber emphasized, this predisposition manifests differently depending on ideological context: while right-wing populists typically reject climate action as a threat to national sovereignty, tradition, or economic competitiveness, left-wing populists may frame climate policy as failing to address social justice concerns or as captured by corporate elites.

Professor Huber’s empirical findings, drawn from an original expert survey spanning 31 European countries, provided systematic evidence that higher degrees of populism correlate with greater climate skepticism across left, center, and right ideological groups—a pattern that challenges assumptions that left-wing populism is inherently pro-climate. His analysis revealed that while right-wing populist parties are the most climate-skeptic overall, even left-wing populists tend to express less support for climate policy and climate science than their non-populist counterparts.

Professor Huber’s closing call for researchers to avoid simplistic conflations and instead carefully disentangle the multiple drivers of populist climate narratives underscored a central lesson for Summer School participants: populism’s engagement with climate change is multifaceted, context-dependent, and inseparable from broader struggles over democracy, legitimacy, and trust in expertise.

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a globally renowned cognitive scientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Bristol.

ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 – Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky: Climate Change, Populism, and Disinformation

by ArticlesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHomeReports

The eighth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 was delivered online by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a globally recognized expert on misinformation and political psychology. His presentation offered a penetrating analysis of how climate disinformation is fueled by an organized infrastructure of vested interests and amplified by populist politics, which undermine trust in science. Professor Lewandowsky highlighted that ideological commitments—particularly free-market conservatism—strongly shape public acceptance of climate science. He emphasized that communicating the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change can be a powerful corrective but cautioned that disinformation thrives in an environment where politics and identity outweigh facts. His lecture underscored the urgent need to confront these structural and ideological barriers to effective climate action.

Reported by ECPS Staff

The eighth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, titled “Climate Change, Populism, and Disinformation,” took place online on July 11, 2025, as part of a week-long program dedicated to exploring the intersection of populism and climate change under the theme “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders.”The lecture was delivered by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a globally renowned cognitive scientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Bristol. 

Professor Lewandowsky’s research spans political psychology, misinformation, and the relationship between human cognition and digital media, focusing particularly on how misinformation about critical issues—such as climate change—takes hold and persists. His expertise has earned him numerous accolades, including fellowships from the Royal Society and the Academy of Social Science, a Humboldt Research Award, and election to the prestigious German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina). He has authored hundreds of scholarly publications, many of which appear in leading journals, and is a frequent contributor to policy discussions and media commentary on the challenges posed by misinformation to democracy and public understanding.

Moderating the session was Neo Sithole, a Research Fellow at ECPS, whose work focuses on the relationship between populist politics and global governance. 

Professor Lewandowsky’s lecture addressed one of the most urgent and challenging phenomena of our time: the proliferation of disinformation in the climate domain and its entanglement with populist politics. The lecture provided participants with a comprehensive framework structured around four key themes: (1) contextualizing today’s “post-truth” condition; (2) examining the supply side of climate disinformation, including the institutional and financial networks that propagate it; (3) analyzing the demand side—why certain segments of the public are receptive to misinformation; and (4) exploring potential strategies to counteract the spread and influence of climate-related falsehoods.

In doing so, Professor Lewandowsky offered a penetrating analysis of how populism not only fosters skepticism about climate change but also contributes to the erosion of the very idea of factual truth itself. His presentation challenged participants to think critically about the deeper cultural, political, and epistemological forces at play in shaping public attitudes toward climate change, making it an essential contribution to the Summer School’s interdisciplinary exploration of populism’s global impact.

Populism, Propaganda, and the Collapse of Truth

Donald J. Trump, the 47th President of the United States, at his inauguration celebration in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2025. Photo: Muhammad Abdullah.

Professor Lewandowsky began by setting the scene with a trenchant analysis of today’s so-called “post-truth world.” He described this condition as exemplified by US President Donald Trump, who “during his first presidency made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims—about one an hour, 24/7 for four years.” Yet despite this unprecedented torrent of misinformation, Professor Lewandowsky noted a striking paradox: “About three-quarters of his voters considered him to be honest during that time, and that to me is a real conundrum.”

This conundrum, he argued, reveals that misinformation today is not simply about factual disputes but reflects a deeper collapse in the very notion of truth itself. He illustrated this through the infamous controversy surrounding Trump’s inauguration crowd size. Using photographs that plainly demonstrated that Obama’s inauguration had far higher attendance, Professor Lewandowsky posed the question: “The falsehood is so easily disproven that you wonder why anybody would even bother with this.” The answer, he suggested, lies in what has been termed “shock and chaos disinformation”—an intentional blizzard of lies whose purpose is not to persuade but to undermine the very idea of factual reality.

Indeed, a revealing study conducted immediately after Trump’s inauguration showed that “Trump voters, and in particular those who are highly educated, were more likely to pick the wrong picture.” This led Professor Lewandowsky to conclude that this behavior reflects “participatory propaganda,” where individuals knowingly repeat falsehoods to signal political allegiance rather than out of ignorance. “They knew there were fewer people attending Trump’s inauguration, but it didn’t matter, because they wanted to support him,” he explained.

Professor Lewandowsky then situated this phenomenon within a broader critique of populism. At its core, populism asserts an artificial and often arbitrary division between “the people” and “the elites,” a division which, he noted, “negates pluralism because any opposition to the people is by definition bad, so it is anti-democratic.” Crucially, he highlighted that populism undermines epistemic standards by elevating intuition and “common sense” above empirical evidence. Citing Trump’s baseless attribution of a plane crash to diversity hires in air traffic control, Professor Lewandowsky observed: “There’s no evidence for that—complete, utter nonsense—and when he was asked about it, he said, ‘Well, it’s common sense.’”

This epistemological posture, he argued, renders populism “by design incompatible and in constant conflict with science,” because it rejects the principle that “evidence matters to adjudicating the state of the world.” As a result, even in contexts where survey data show that a majority of Americans accept anthropogenic climate change, Professor Lewandowsky cautioned that “what this obscures is the amazing divergence… less than a quarter of Republicans think climate change is a big deal or should be taken seriously.” He concluded that the Republican Party had “mutated into this populist-slash-fascist organization that has little resemblance to the Republican Party that I’m used to when I was living in the United States.”

Through this analysis, Professor Lewandowsky made clear that contemporary climate denialism and disinformation cannot be understood apart from the populist assault on truth itself. His lecture highlighted how misinformation serves as a political identity marker, shielding adherents from empirical falsification and entrenching ideological divides.

The Supply Side: The Infrastructure of Climate Disinformation

Illustration: Shutterstock / Skorzewiak.

In his incisive lecture, Professor Lewandowsky devoted significant attention to what he termed the “supply side” of climate disinformation—the institutional, financial, and rhetorical infrastructure fueling public misunderstanding about climate change. He began by posing critical questions: What forces drive disinformation? Who is shaping the narratives that mislead the public? Drawing on empirical research, he argued that climate disinformation is not random but anchored in a visible network of organizations operating predominantly in the United States and Europe. This infrastructure, while “in broad daylight,” often escapes the public’s attention.

At the core of this infrastructure is a striking financial commitment from vested interests, particularly fossil fuel industries and their affiliates. Professor Lewandowsky observed that these actors receive almost a billion dollars annually—a figure that, though not exclusively devoted to climate denial, reflects the depth of resources sustaining disinformation campaigns. In addition, lobbying efforts aimed at blocking climate policy in the US Congress account for approximately two billion dollars more, illustrating the immense scale and persistence of attempts to distort climate discourse.

Professor Lewandowsky highlighted a study by Justin Farrell that mapped relationships among organizations engaged in climate denial. This research demonstrated that institutions known to be funded by Exxon or the Koch Brothers tend to occupy central positions in these disinformation networks. This finding underscores how denial campaigns are not simply ideological but orchestrated, with financial and strategic backing from corporate interests.

He turned next to media dynamics that amplify this disinformation. Professor Lewandowsky critiqued the enduring journalistic tendency toward false balance: while balance is appropriate in political contexts, it becomes problematic when applied to science, where the balance should be “between evidence and not between opinions.” He illustrated how mainstream media for years gave equal time to climate scientists and fringe voices opposing the science, sometimes to absurd extremes—such as featuring an astrologist predicting cats’ personalities while dismissing climate change as a hoax.

Although this problematic media practice has improved marginally, Professor Lewandowsky argued that a disproportionate voice is still granted to contrarians. He pointed out that press releases from conservative think tanks attacking climate science continue to receive more media attention than university research highlighting the scientific consensus.

Having described this infrastructure of disinformation and amplification, Professor Lewandowsky turned to the disinformation content itself. He acknowledged that it is commonly assumed—sometimes too casually—that the claims spread by think tanks are inaccurate, but he insisted on demonstrating this rigorously. He introduced a taxonomy of science denial rhetoric, highlighting cherry picking as one of the most pervasive techniques.

To illustrate cherry picking, Professor Lewandowsky described a notorious example: a British opinion piece that cited a short-term drop in global temperature between two Januarys in 2007 as proof that climate science was wrong. This claim ignored long-term warming trends in favor of a trivial fluctuation—a classic instance of cherry picking. Professor Lewandowsky explained that natural variability, when isolated from broader trends, can be rhetorically exploited to mislead, despite the overwhelming evidence for global warming.

Recognizing that simply pointing out such fallacies often fails to persuade in a polarized environment, Professor Lewandowsky recounted a creative study he and colleagues designed to test denialist reasoning in an ideologically neutral way. They translated climate-denialist claims into an unrelated context—village population trends—and presented these translated claims, accompanied by corresponding graphs, to professional statisticians. The statisticians overwhelmingly found that the denialist interpretations were inaccurate and not suitable for informing policy, whereas the scientific consensus interpretations aligned with the data. This experiment compellingly demonstrated that denialist arguments fail not because of political contestation but because they are empirically incorrect.

Professor Lewandowsky concluded this portion of his lecture with a sobering observation: the public is being actively denied the right to accurate information about an existential risk. This is not simply a matter of competing narratives, he argued, but a profound ethical and political problem. The public is being misled through a coordinated and well-funded campaign, obstructing collective action on one of the most urgent challenges of our time.

Overall, Professor Lewandowsky’s analysis exposed a sophisticated, well-resourced, and tightly coordinated infrastructure of climate disinformation, showing that climate denial is not simply ignorance but an orchestrated political project closely tied to populist movements and vested interests. His lecture called on participants to recognize the structural forces behind disinformation and underscored the need for rigorous, empirically grounded responses that hold these forces accountable.

The Demand Side: Why People Believe Climate Misinformation

In this part of his lecture, Professor Lewandowsky explored the “demand side” of climate disinformation, focusing on the question of why significant segments of the public are receptive to misinformation about climate change. Rather than attributing this to simple ignorance or lack of information, Professor Lewandowsky argued that the primary driver is ideology: people’s deeply held worldviews and political identities shape how they interpret and accept information, including scientific evidence. 

He began by underscoring a striking pattern from decades of research: attitudes toward climate change are strongly determined by an individual’s ideological orientation, particularly their endorsement of free-market principles. Whether measured as conservatism, libertarianism, or party affiliation, the relationship is consistent globally: individuals who favor small government and deregulated markets are much more likely to reject the scientific consensus on climate change. As Professor Lewandowsky summarized, this pattern is “pervasive,” observed not only in the United States and other English-speaking countries but also in diverse contexts worldwide.

One particularly counterintuitive finding Professor Lewandowsky emphasized was that increased education does not necessarily reduce skepticism about climate change; instead, it amplifies existing ideological divides. In the United States, for example, more educated Democrats are more likely to accept climate science, while more educated Republicans become even more dismissive. This suggests that higher education may provide the cognitive tools for individuals to selectively reinforce beliefs aligned with their political identities—a phenomenon known as “motivated reasoning.”

Professor Lewandowsky encouraged participants to think not only about political ideology but also about the relationship between science itself and certain ideological outlooks. He pointed out that science, over the centuries, has displaced humanity from its perceived centrality in the universe, challenging beliefs in human exceptionalism. For those who maintain strongly anthropocentric or hierarchical worldviews—a tendency more common among conservatives—this can be profoundly unsettling.

Moreover, Professor Lewandowsky highlighted how the core norms of science may conflict with conservative values. Drawing on classical sociological analysis, he explained that science rests on principles such as universalism, communal sharing of knowledge, and disinterestedness. He noted that even the language—terms like “communism” and “universalism”—can sound alien or even threatening to those who value national sovereignty, individualism, and hierarchy. This creates a deeper tension: resistance to climate science may not only reflect skepticism about a particular set of facts but discomfort with the very norms and practices of scientific inquiry.

To substantiate this, Professor Lewandowsky described empirical work examining correlations between individuals’ conservatism, their acceptance of scientific norms, and their attitudes toward climate change and vaccination. The results revealed that people who strongly endorsed conservative values were less likely to accept both climate science and vaccines and were also less likely to endorse the core norms of science itself. This association existed independently of exposure to specific scientific findings, suggesting that a general distrust of the scientific enterprise plays a significant role in shaping attitudes.

Professor Lewandowsky also noted that this distrust is exacerbated by the policy implications of climate science: addressing climate change requires government interventions in the market, such as carbon pricing or emissions regulations—policies fundamentally at odds with libertarian or free-market worldviews. Thus, opposition to climate science is often inseparable from opposition to perceived threats to economic freedom.

Communicating Consensus and Political Realism

In the final part of his lecture, Professor Lewandowsky addressed possible strategies for countering climate misinformation, with a focus on the communication of scientific consensus. He began by acknowledging a fundamental challenge: simply providing accurate information is often ineffective in today’s polarized environment. Ideological commitments, he noted, strongly shape whether people accept or reject scientific evidence, meaning that facts alone are unlikely to change minds.

Nevertheless, Professor Lewandowsky argued that one communicative strategy stands out as particularly promising—emphasizing the overwhelming consensus among climate scientists. To illustrate this point, he used an analogy: “Would you eat oysters if 97 out of 100 microbiologists told you they were contaminated and unsafe to eat? I wouldn’t touch these damn things,” he remarked, underscoring how consensus messaging taps into a basic human intuition about expert agreement.

Professor Lewandowsky stressed that the scientific consensus on climate change is similarly robust: over 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human activity is driving global warming, a level of agreement comparable to other widely accepted scientific facts. Importantly, he explained, communicating this fact has been empirically shown to be effective. “Consensus information can be a very powerful tool to shift people’s perceptions,” he noted, citing meta-analyses and recent studies across 27 countries that found this approach particularly helpful in reaching audiences with low institutional trust and right-leaning ideological commitments.

He highlighted his own collaborative work, including the production of a handbook explaining how consensus messaging works, why it matters, and how it can be deployed effectively. However, Professor Lewandowsky offered a sobering caveat. “Everything I’m saying about communication needs to be assessed against the harsh political realities we’re facing,” he warned. These realities include the global retreat of democracy and the increasing concentration of power among unaccountable elites who actively oppose climate action, even when market-based.

In this context, he cautioned against overestimating what better communication can achieve: “We’re living in a world in which people aren’t waiting for scientists to inform them. It’s a political battle. It’s about power, not science or communication.” While communicating consensus remains a useful tool, he concluded, it is not a panacea. The struggle over climate change is ultimately embedded in larger political and ideological conflicts that extend far beyond the reach of scientific expertise.

Professor Lewandowsky’s closing reflections captured the dilemma facing climate communicators today: opportunities exist, particularly because most people still trust scientists, but these must be pursued with humility about the limits of persuasion in a polarized and increasingly illiberal political environment.

Conclusion

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky’s lecture provided a powerful analysis of how climate denialism is rooted not simply in ignorance or confusion but in the intersection of populist politics, ideological worldviews, and deliberate disinformation campaigns. His four-part framework—contextualizing the post-truth environment, analyzing the disinformation infrastructure, understanding ideological drivers of belief, and offering communicative responses—equipped participants of the ECPS Academy Summer School with critical tools for diagnosing and confronting climate denial.

At its core, Professor Lewandowsky’s argument underscored that the climate crisis is as much a political and epistemological challenge as it is a scientific one. As he emphasized throughout, combating disinformation will require more than facts—it will require confronting the ideological and institutional forces that weaponize misinformation to obstruct climate action.

His insights resonated deeply with the Summer School’s overarching theme, illuminating the complex entanglements between populism and climate politics in an age of disinformation. The lecture not only dissected the mechanisms of denial but also pointed toward the political struggle ahead, reminding participants that defending climate science ultimately means defending democracy itself.

Protest against the IMARC conference in Melbourne, Australia, October 28, 2019. Extinction Rebellion and other groups march in Southbank to oppose the mining and resource industry event. Photo: Adam Calaitzis.

ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 – Prof. Philippe Le Billon: Climate Change, Natural Resources and Conflicts

by ArticlesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHomeReports

Professor Philippe Le Billon’s lecture critically examined how climate-related conflicts emerge from three sources: the impacts of climate change itself, contestation over climate inaction, and backlash against climate action. He argued that climate change operates as a “threat multiplier,” intensifying pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities rather than acting as an isolated trigger of violence. He explored how climate activism—while driven by moral urgency—can be framed as elitist and provoke populist opposition, and how the implementation of climate policy can generate new conflicts when perceived as unjust or technocratic. Professor Le Billon warned that “green capitalism” risks reproducing extractive logics, creating new “green sacrifice zones,” and underscored that climate justice requires confronting colonial legacies, class inequality, and structural power relations.

Reported by ECPS Staff

The seventh lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025—titled “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders”—took place online on July 10, 2025.  The day’s featured lecturer was Professor Philippe Le Billon, an esteemed scholar of political geography and political ecology at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Prior to joining UBC, Professor Le Billon worked with prominent institutions including the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), as well as with environmental and human rights organizations. His research has long focused on the political economy of natural resources, extractivism, and the connections between environment, development, and security—especially in conflict settings. His current work engages closely with environmental defenders, small-scale fisheries, and the socio-political dimensions of the so-called “green transition.”

Though Professor Le Billon modestly framed himself as “not a major expert on climate change,” his extensive scholarship on the political economy of resource sectors, conflict, and environmental governance provided a compelling framework for analyzing climate-related conflicts in relation to populism. His lecture, titled “Climate Change, Natural Resources and Conflicts,” examined how climate-related conflicts increasingly shape and are shaped by populist mobilizations globally.

Professor Le Billon invited participants to think critically about climate conflict through a tripartite analytical lens: conflicts driven by the impacts of climate change; conflicts driven by perceived climate inaction; and conflicts triggered by the implementation of climate action itself. Framing his talk within what he described as the current era of “polycrisis”—marked by intertwined crises of climate, inequality, and governance—Professor Le Billon emphasized that climate change must be understood as a political issue embedded in structures of power, inequality, and historical injustice.

By drawing on case studies from around the world, his lecture challenged participants to reflect on the multifaceted relationship between populism and climate politics, showing how climate change is at once a driver of conflict and a contested arena where competing visions of justice, sovereignty, and socio-ecological futures play out.

Conflicts over Climate Impacts: From Environmental Stress to Political Violence

Hundreds of climate activists lie down in front of News Corp Australia headquarters in Sydney calling the Murdoch press liers on January 31, 2020.

Professor Le Billon reflected on the prevailing focus in academic and policy circles on conflicts attributed to the material impacts of climate change itself. He framed this discussion within the literature that examines how climate-induced environmental stress—particularly droughts, altered rainfall, and extreme weather—affects resource availability and contributes to tensions over land, water, and livelihoods.

As he explained, “generally, the drivers have been portrayed and naturalized as fitted with things like higher temperature, altered rainfall patterns, more frequent and intense disasters, sea level rise, etc. So droughts in particular have been a major focus.” To this list, he added lesser-discussed ecological dynamics such as “shifts in resources—so grassland seasonality, but also fish migrations. Every fish species has a temperature range that they like, and so they’ll migrate as temperatures warm up or cool down, and that can lead to fishing conflicts.”

Professor Le Billon was careful to emphasize that while climate change is an important contextual factor, it is rarely the sole or primary driver of violent conflict. He invoked the now widely accepted notion that climate change acts as a “threat multiplier,” noting that it “amplifies existing vulnerabilities” where poverty, inequality, livelihood insecurity, and political exclusion already prevail. He stressed that scholars and policymakers must avoid simplistic causality and instead attend to these intersections as the crucial sites of analysis.

To illustrate this argument, he cited several case studies, including the recurrent droughts in Syria, which “had a nasty effect on communities in Syria, and would have been part of the lead-up to the Syrian civil war. Of course, this is by far not the only factor, but it would have been an aggravating one.” He similarly highlighted the Sahel, where tensions between farmers and herders reflect a long history of land disputes now exacerbated by environmental pressures.

Professor Le Billon also drew attention to lesser-known cases of ecological disruption, such as fisheries conflicts prompted by species migration as ocean temperatures change. These examples underscore that climate change is interwoven with complex social and economic dynamics rather than being an external or autonomous driver of violence.

Critically, Professor Le Billon challenged dominant frameworks for analyzing these conflicts, identifying two key forms of reductionism: the naturalization of climate change itself and the culturalization of conflict. He argued that “what it has done also is generally depoliticized the inequalities that are at play in those countries, the kind of colonial legacies that have led to the type of property rights or absence of property rights,” and the “type of extractivist legislation that is in place.” Such framings, he cautioned, obscure the historical and structural conditions that have made many communities in the Global South so vulnerable to environmental shocks in the first place.

This depoliticization, he warned, enables securitized responses, particularly in the Global North, where governments increasingly treat climate-affected populations as threats—especially potential climate migrants—rather than as subjects of justice and solidarity. As Professor Le Billon put it, “many of these conflicts take place in, and affect, populations in the Global South which are the least responsible for what has happened.” Yet Northern discourse tends to focus on fears of migration, feeding into anti-immigration agendas and populist narratives of external threat.

Professor Le Billon’s intervention here was also a normative one: he argued that these conflicts should not be framed as technical problems requiring security solutions, but rather as calls for climate justice. He proposed that “rather than seeing [them] as a conflict,” these phenomena “should be seen as a call for justice rather than a call for militarized protection from Northern societies against those climate and conflict migrants.”

Moreover, he drew attention to the way populist actors at the domestic level have manipulated identity politics to escalate these conflicts. In many contexts, governments have “legitimated violence against those groups,” by framing nomadic herders or marginalized populations as scapegoats for broader socio-economic grievances. He noted that this dynamic is mirrored at the international level, where right-wing populists in the Global North leverage the specter of mass climate migration to bolster anti-immigration policies.

Conflicts over Climate Inaction: The Rise of Climate Activism and Eco-Populism

No Mining protest sign in Kaeo, New Zealand, September 15, 2013. While coal mining produced 5.3 million tonnes in 2010, acid mine drainage remains a serious environmental problem. Photo: Rafael Ben Ari.

The second broad category explored by Professor Le Billon concerned conflicts motivated by perceived inaction on climate change. These conflicts, while often nonviolent and institutional in form, represent an important and increasingly contentious terrain of political struggle. Professor Le Billon traced the rise of protests, demonstrations, and civil disobedience aimed at governments and corporations failing to address climate change. These movements, such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, have emerged as potent social forces, demanding rapid action to avert climate catastrophe and often invoking the urgency of saving humanity and the planet. As Professor Le Billon put it, these movements are driven by “concerns for current and future impacts of climate change… it’s often a call for saving humanity and the planet in general, and in itself it can be sometimes quite problematic.” This universalist framing, he noted, is both rhetorically powerful and politically vulnerable.

While recognizing the moral force and legitimacy of these movements, Professor Le Billon offered a critical reflection on their social composition and political rhetoric. “Very often the people participating in the protests also have a relatively privileged background, and so it’s relatively easy to frame them as essentially privileged elites not being too preoccupied with the immediate concerns of some of the other population,” he observed. This tension, he argued, can be—and often is—instrumentalized by populist actors who portray climate activists as out-of-touch elites imposing burdens on ordinary people.

At the same time, Professor Le Billon highlighted the distinctive populist inflection of much climate activism itself, particularly in its critique of fossil fuel lobbies, global corporations, and corrupt elites. In this framing, “the climate inaction is framed as a result of decisions made by corrupt elites, greedy corporations, elitist global institutions that are done at the expense of local communities and the planet.” Thus, progressive eco-populism casts “the people” as aligned with the planet against an oligarchy of corporate and political actors who block meaningful climate action. This framing frequently intersects with indigenous and peasant movements, as seen in opposition to pipelines and extractive projects in North America and beyond.

However, as Professor Le Billon noted, these movements are not without internal tensions and external challenges. He pointed out that their demands often shift toward more radical critiques of the underlying political economy: “Essentially when people start not only to claim that there is climate inaction on the part of governments, but that the current system means that the government is incapable of acting… thus there is a need for a system change—that’s when we see a lot of violence taking place in different ways.”

This dynamic helps explain why such movements are subject to escalating repression and criminalization, particularly when they adopt disruptive tactics such as blockades and sabotage. Professor Le Billon discussed how governments in liberal democracies such as Australia, the UK, and Norway have responded with “very high arrest rates… while police violence has tended to be relatively low,” in contrast to countries like France, South Africa, or Peru, where “the rate of arrest is very low but the rate of police violence is very high.”

He emphasized that repression tends to correlate with movements that shift their critique beyond specific policies to systemic structures of capitalism and fossil fuel dependence: “It’s essentially when they start to challenge the system itself that we see an intensification of violence and repression.” Thus, his lecture illuminated the complex relationship between climate activism, eco-populism, and state repression. Professor Le Billon’s analysis underscored both the promise and the perils of contemporary climate movements, situating them as key arenas where conflicts over climate inaction are contested not only between activists and the state but also within broader struggles over privilege, legitimacy, and systemic change.

Conflicts over Climate Action: Green Transitions and Class Struggles

Protest against lithium mining in Belgrade, Serbia, August 10, 2024. A protester holds a placard reading “Stop Rio Tinto” during a demonstration opposing the company’s lithium mining plans. Photo: Dreamstime.

The third type of conflict examined by Professor Le Billon concerned resistance to climate action itself. Paradoxically, he noted that even as climate movements demand urgent measures, the implementation of climate policies can generate backlash and new sites of conflict—especially when these policies are perceived as unjust, unequal, or technocratic. As he remarked, “it’s common sense to intervene and change our system so that we’ve got more climate action—but the common sense also is that this transition cannot happen overnight,” capturing the contested terrain of climate policy.

He discussed the removal of fossil fuel subsidies in countries such as Nigeria, where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and climate policy imperatives have converged in advocating for subsidy reforms. While the removal of subsidies might advance climate objectives on paper, they also provoke protests from populations who view them as essential to their livelihoods and who see such reforms as anti-poor. “Many people see material well-being and the imperative of social reproduction as being very important,” he observed, underscoring why such reforms often spark resistance.

Similar tensions have emerged around carbon taxes, electric vehicle subsidies, and renewable energy projects. In Canada, for example, carbon taxation became a major electoral issue in 2025, with fierce populist opposition portraying it as an attack on the working class. In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right party has opposed offshore wind farms, portraying them as an imposition on local fishing communities—a populist strategy that, Professor Le Billon noted, mirrors narratives used in the American context around coal miners and oil workers. He pointed out that such movements tap into a grievance that “green liberalism puts a lot of focus on individual responsibility,” leading to perceptions that environmental policies disproportionately burden working-class populations while privileging elites.

Professor Le Billon introduced a critical perspective on what he termed “green capitalism” and “green extractivism”: the reproduction of extractive logics in the pursuit of green growth. Renewable energy infrastructure and low-carbon technologies, he observed, rely heavily on critical minerals such as lithium, often extracted from indigenous lands or ecologically sensitive regions in the Global South. These new “green sacrifice zones,” as he put it, “frame the climate crisis as resolvable through resource-intensive technological fixes” while perpetuating inequality and ecological harm. He noted that “about 70% of the energy transition mineral projects are near land that can be qualified as sites with indigenous people or traditional peasants,” a statistic that lays bare the colonial patterns embedded in the green transition.

He referenced resistance movements in the Andes, where lithium extraction has threatened fragile ecosystems and indigenous communities, as well as protests in Serbia against a Rio Tinto mining project. These conflicts illustrate how green transitions, if pursued within the existing capitalist framework, may perpetuate old injustices even as they address carbon emissions. As one protester quoted by Le Billon put it, “Green mining doesn’t exist… Politicians need to stop trying to get rid of pollution in cities by polluting our villages instead,” a vivid expression of the local-global tensions animating these struggles.

Professor Le Billon argued that the articulation of populism in these conflicts often turns on competing definitions of “the people.” In some cases, populist rhetoric is mobilized from the right, defending local or national sovereignty against globalist green agendas. In others, it emerges from the left, articulating an anti-elite critique of corporate greenwashing and imperialism. Both forms, he suggested, reflect deeper class struggles over who bears the costs and reaps the benefits of the energy transition: “We see a kind of two main categories… one is a critique of green liberalism… and the second one is against green extractivism, pushing back against the so-called extractivist imperative.”

In sum, Professor Le Billon’s analysis illuminated the complex and often contradictory ways in which climate action itself generates conflict, highlighting how struggles over green transitions are increasingly shaped by narratives of class, sovereignty, and justice. His lecture invited participants to recognize that without attention to these underlying dynamics, climate policy risks reproducing precisely the inequalities and exclusions it seeks to remedy.

Conclusion

In concluding his lecture, Professor Le Billon underscored the importance of understanding climate conflicts in all their complexity—not simply as environmental disputes but as deeply embedded in histories of inequality, structures of capitalism, and struggles over power and justice.

His three-part framework highlighted that conflicts emerge not only from the material impacts of climate change but also from contestation over climate inaction and from the contested implementation of climate policies themselves. Across these domains, populism plays an ambivalent role: sometimes reinforcing reactionary politics and obstruction, sometimes animating progressive alliances around climate justice.

Throughout the lecture, Professor Le Billon emphasized the need to critically examine the political economy of the green transition. He warned against narratives that frame climate mitigation as a purely technocratic project, disconnected from questions of inequality, colonialism, and class power. Without confronting these deeper structures, he argued, climate action risks reproducing the very injustices it seeks to redress.

His analysis also illuminated the paradoxical dynamics at play: climate policy can simultaneously be a site of progressive mobilization and conservative backlash; climate discourse can empower grassroots movements but also invite repression; and the pursuit of sustainability can generate new forms of extractivism and environmental sacrifice.

In sum, Professor Le Billon’s lecture made an invaluable contribution to the ECPS Summer School’s exploration of the nexus between populism and climate change. It provided participants with critical tools for understanding how climate conflicts are not simply about environmental degradation but also about contested visions of justice, sovereignty, and the political future. His call to recognize the uneven and contested terrain of climate politics resonated with the overarching theme of the Summer School: the urgent need to craft policy responses that are attentive not only to ecological imperatives but also to the demands of social and global justice.

Professor Erik Swyngedouw, a globally respected scholar in the fields of political ecology and critical social theory. He is Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester and Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change.

ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 – Prof. Eric Swyngedouw: The Climate Deadlock and The Unbearable Lightness of Climate Populism

by ArticlesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHomeReports

In his compelling lecture, Professor Erik Swyngedouw offered a radical critique of contemporary climate discourse, describing it as trapped in a “climate deadlock” where knowledge and activism coexist with deepening ecological crisis. He argued that mainstream and radical climate narratives mirror the structure of populism, constructing simplistic binaries while displacing attention from capitalism’s core role in driving environmental destruction. Professor Swyngedouw challenged participants to recognize that the environmental apocalypse is not an imminent future but an unevenly distributed present reality for much of the world. His provocative call to dismantle the comforting fantasy of a unified humanity urged a re-politicization of the climate crisis, demanding systemic transformation and solidarity grounded in confronting global inequalities.

Reported by ECPS Staff

The sixth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, titled “The Climate Deadlock and The Unbearable Lightness of Climate Populism,” was delivered as part of the broader program, “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders,” held online from July 7 to 11, 2025. 

The lecture was presented by Professor Erik Swyngedouw, a globally respected scholar in the fields of political ecology and critical social theory. He is Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester and Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change. His work interrogates the political dimensions of environmental crises, urbanization, and social power. Among his major publications are Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Post-Democratic Environment (MIT Press), Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in 20th Century Spain (MIT Press), and Social Power and the Urbanisation of Nature (Oxford University Press). His forthcoming book Enjoying Climate Change (Verso), co-authored with Lucas Pohl, extends his critical inquiry into the paradoxes of contemporary climate discourse.

Moderating the session was Jonathan White, Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics. Professor White is a prominent scholar of democracy, political temporality, and European politics. His books include In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea (2024), Politics of Last Resort: Governing by Emergency in the European Union(2019), and The Meaning of Partisanship (2016, with Lea Ypi). As moderator, Professor White introduced the speaker, contextualized the discussion within contemporary debates on populism and climate change, and facilitated a lively and thoughtful discussion by drawing connections between climate discourse, democratic politics, and visions of the future.

In his lecture, Professor Swyngedouw advanced a provocative and unsettling critique of contemporary climate discourse. He argued that despite widespread scientific consensus, institutional action, and activist mobilization, the condition of the planet continues to deteriorate—a paradox he termed the “climate deadlock.” Drawing on a psychoanalytically informed, Marxist perspective, Professor Swyngedouw contended that mainstream climate discourse functions in ways structurally parallel to populism, constructing binary narratives of virtuous “people” versus villainous “elites” or “external threats” (such as CO₂), while masking the real systemic drivers of ecological catastrophe: capitalism’s relentless imperative for accumulation and growth.

Professor Swyngedouw’s central claim—that both liberal and radical climate discourses reproduce depoliticization by focusing obsessively on carbon emissions as a fetish object—challenged participants to rethink familiar narratives. He argued that the obsessive focus on CO₂ reduction displaces attention from the deep class antagonisms and material inequalities at the root of the climate crisis, allowing societies to “act as if” they are responding to climate change while leaving intact the socio-economic structures that cause environmental destruction. This displacement, he explained, generates what he termed the “unbearable lightness of climate populism”—an empty consensus that obscures the political transformations truly required.

This lecture, rich in theoretical rigor and critical insight, provided a powerful contribution to the Summer School’s objective of fostering critical debate about populism and climate change. It invited participants to reflect on how even well-intentioned environmental discourses can perpetuate depoliticization and obstruct radical action, urging a re-politicization that directly confronts the systemic drivers of ecological crisis.

Focusing on the Climate Obscures the Politics

Flooding in Bangladesh’s delta region: Villagers on Charkajal Island endure rising waters, sea-level rise, and intense monsoon rains—making Bangladesh one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. Photo: Dreamstime.

In his lecture, Professor Erik Swyngedouw delivered a provocative opening that set the tone for his critical analysis of climate discourse. Speaking with characteristic wit and candor, Professor Swyngedouw began by emphasizing a paradoxical but central claim: if we truly want to take the climate crisis seriously, we must stop focusing on the climate itself. This counterintuitive assertion framed his argument that the mainstream climate consensus—shared across liberal, radical, and even activist sectors—has become trapped in what he described as a “climate deadlock.”

According to Professor Swyngedouw, this deadlock emerges not from ignorance but from a deep structural dynamic. While knowledge and consensus about the seriousness of climate change are widespread, genuine transformative action remains absent. He argued that climate discourse today is structured in ways that parallel populist discourses: it constructs a binary narrative of virtuous “people” versus villainous “elites” and simplifies complex socio-economic realities by reducing them to fetishized objects—greenhouse gases like CO₂, methane, and nitrous oxides.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Professor Swyngedouw contended that greenhouse gases have come to function as a “fetish” in the classic sense: a symbolic object that absorbs collective anxiety while allowing the underlying socio-political structures that drive ecological crisis—especially global capitalism and accumulation—to remain intact. In this view, the obsessive focus on CO₂ reduction serves as a form of displacement that assures that nothing fundamentally changes. Thus, Professor Swyngedouw’s core proposition was that mainstream and even radical climate discourses have become part of a pervasive depoliticization process, obscuring the real sources of the crisis while creating the illusion of action.

Mapping the Climate Deadlock

Professor Swyngedouw offered a penetrating analysis of what he termed the “climate deadlock,” a paradoxical condition in which global awareness and consensus about climate change coexist with mounting environmental degradation and policy failure. Professor Swyngedouw underscored that, despite widespread knowledge, sophisticated technologies, radical activism, and repeated calls for urgent action, climate parameters continue to worsen, with greenhouse gas emissions rising relentlessly. He framed this as a profound political and psychological impasse demanding a different conceptual lens.

To illuminate this impasse, Professor Swyngedouw employed a Marxist-Lacanian, psychoanalytically informed perspective, focusing especially on the psychology of those most committed to climate action: radical activists and conscientious citizens alike. He argued that many such actors—while passionately advocating for change—are caught in forms of what psychoanalysis calls “surplus enjoyment” and “hysterical acting out,” manifested in both symbolic protests and personal lifestyle adjustments, such as reducing air travel or adopting vegetarianism. These practices, while seemingly transformative, actually sustain an underlying attachment to the existing socio-ecological order.

Fetishistic Disavowal and the Object Cause of Desire

Drawing inspiration from the French philosopher Alain Badiou, Professor Swyngedouw suggested that the dominant climate discourse operates as a new “opium of the people”: a depoliticizing ideology that channels political energies into managing “the climate” as a technical object while obscuring the deeper power structures—especially capitalism—that drive ecological crisis. Central to this critique is the concept of “fetishistic disavowal,” where societies simultaneously acknowledge the reality of climate change yet act as if they do not know, displacing transformative political struggle onto the technical management of greenhouse gases, which have been fetishized as the primary cause of crisis.

Professor Swyngedouw thus identified a dangerous cognitive dissonance: even as greenhouse gas concentrations reach record highs, mainstream discourse congratulates itself on partial regional successes, such as EU emissions reductions, while ignoring how these reductions are offset by increases elsewhere to sustain global consumption patterns. This displacement allows societies to avoid confronting the “real” socio-political antagonisms and material inequalities embedded in the climate crisis.

Professor Swyngedouw argued that climate discourse and activism are not only shaped by the urgent need to address ecological breakdown but also marked by a libidinal attachment to the very socio-ecological order they critique. He suggested that many climate activists, while sincerely desiring a socially just, democratic, and environmentally sustainable world, displace this larger, daunting desire onto a “small object” that stands in for systemic transformation: the reduction of CO₂ emissions.

Professor Swyngedouw likened this displacement to the structure of fetishism in psychoanalysis, where desire attaches to a fragment or object—such as a shoe—allowing the subject to avoid confronting the whole, more difficult reality of a relationship. In this case, he contended that CO₂ becomes the “little object of desire,” the symbolic focal point around which hopes for ecological and social renewal revolve. This focus allows activists and institutions alike to engage in practices like recycling, dietary changes, and ethical consumption—actions that offer partial satisfaction but ultimately fail to address the root cause of the crisis: the capitalist drive for endless growth.

Professor Swyngedouw maintained that this fetishization ensures that the true trauma at the heart of the climate crisis—the need for radical political and socio-economic transformation—remains disavowed. By focusing on CO₂ as the manageable object, climate discourse paradoxically enables enjoyment of critique and activism while leaving intact the structures that produce ecological harm, thereby sustaining the status quo under the guise of transformation.

The Unbearable Lightness of Climate Populism

Respect Indigenous Peoples’ Rights: A group representing Indigenous communities marches during a climate protest in Copenhagen, Denmark. Photo: Dreamstime.

Professor Swyngedouw advanced a critical argument about what he termed “the unbearable lightness of climate populism.” He began by asserting that, despite widespread calls for change, many subjects do not truly desire a different socio-ecological order. Instead, their desire becomes articulated around CO₂ reduction as the privileged object of action. This displacement, Professor Swyngedouw argued, leads to a discourse whose architecture mirrors the logic of populism—a framework typically associated with right-wing nationalism but, in his analysis, equally at work within liberal and even radical climate discourses.

Professor Swyngedouw described how climate populism unfolds through the consensualization of the climate question, the mobilization of an apocalyptic imaginary, and the reliance on technocratic and managerial solutions. Central to this process, he contended, is the commodification of greenhouse gas emissions, the encouragement of individualized responsibility and guilt, and a focus on technical fixes rather than systemic change. In this way, climate discourse parallels right-wing populism’s structure, even as it espouses different substantive aims.

He outlined that both right-wing populism and mainstream climate discourse frame their arguments around a virtuous “people” threatened by a dangerous “other”—whether migrants or greenhouse gases—while externalizing the root causes of crisis. Both deploy narratives of existential threat and call for decisive action but stop short of confronting the real systemic drivers of inequality and ecological degradation. In Professor Swyngedouw’s formulation, this amounts to a profound depoliticization, where urgent rhetoric masks an incapacity to challenge the socio-ecological status quo.

Professor Swyngedouw summarized the hegemonic view underlying climate populism as a narrative where a global humanitarian threat—caused by idle elites or external invaders like CO₂—requires urgent mitigation using precisely the market-conforming technologies and governance structures that caused the crisis in the first place. This narrative sustains the illusion that catastrophe can be averted, that humanity can be saved, and that a lost Arcadian socio-ecological harmony can be restored if CO₂ levels return to 300 parts per million (ppm)—a formulation that he dismissed as a populist fantasy.

Expanding on this critique, Professor Swyngedouw presented twelve theses illustrating the structural parallels between right-wing populist discourse and climate populism. He invited his audience to imagine substituting the term “migrant” for “CO₂” to recognize the architectural similarity. Both discourses invoke “the people” or even “humanity” as a whole, presupposing a unity that he argued does not exist, as demonstrated by the vast disparities between, for instance, Gaza or Ukraine and wealthier regions. Both posit a direct relationship between public participation and the legitimacy of governance while short-circuiting genuine political conflict by reframing structural issues as matters of technical management.

Professor Swyngedouw pointed out that climate discourse has no privileged subject of transformation—no agent akin to the proletariat for socialists or women for feminists. Instead, it defines the enemy in externalized, fetishized terms: CO₂ becomes an ambiguous, socially empty, homogenized object that obscures the historical and material conditions of its production. A ton of CO₂ is treated as identical regardless of its source or context, encouraging a depoliticized response aimed at trimming “excess” emissions so that business-as-usual can continue.

He warned that dominant climate policies express demands addressed to elites to “act decisively,” rather than seeking to transform the elites themselves or the structures of accumulation and inequality that they defend. As an illustration, Professor Swyngedouw cited the exponentially expanding energy demand driven by artificial intelligence, whose corporate proponents are already ensuring that energy provision—including nuclear energy—will meet future AI growth. This example, he argued, epitomizes how climate discourse moves problems around rather than solving them.

Professor Swyngedouw then probed the appeal of climate populism, asking why so many—from radicals to mainstream actors—are drawn to this discourse. He suggested that its attraction lies in its function as a form of fetishistic disavowal: it allows individuals and societies to take the climate question seriously while avoiding the need for fundamental change. It enables solutions to be located within the familiar contours of technical and managerial governance arrangements while preserving existing socio-ecological power relations.

He cited Alain Badiou’s claim that environmentalism has become the “new opium of the people,” a soothing discourse that ensures things can go on as normal. The result is a climate debate that depoliticizes environmental matters by shifting attention away from what Professor Swyngedouw called “the mad dance of accumulation and its constitutive class dynamics”—the real drivers of climate breakdown. Instead, focus is displaced onto the symptom: CO₂, a fetish object that can be measured, traded, and managed, while the systemic causes remain unchallenged.

Professor Swyngedouw concluded that this logic leads to forms of “obsessive or hysterical climate activism,” which he characterized as “impotent acting out”—a pattern of behavior that allows society to appear engaged while keeping the underlying disease intact. He argued that this practice is supported and reproduced through the deployment of “empty signifiers” like sustainability, mitigation, adaptation, transition, and resilience. These terms enjoy universal approval yet lack substantive content, generating a hollow consensus that depoliticizes the climate question even further.

For Professor Swyngedouw, this configuration exemplifies the depoliticizing and uncannily populist phantasmic narrative and practice of what he termed “the climate catastrophe consensus.” His critique invited participants to reflect critically on the ideological architecture of mainstream climate discourse and the ways in which it allows a destructive socio-ecological system to persist under the guise of environmental concern.

The Real of the Climate Condition

Then, Professor Swyngedouw turned to “the real of the climate condition,” aiming to expose the systemic drivers of climate breakdown often concealed by mainstream discourse. He began by emphasizing the near-perfect correlation between GDP growth and greenhouse gas emissions. For Professor Swyngedouw, this relationship reflects how economic growth—understood as capitalist accumulation—is not merely an obsession but a structural necessity for the sustainability of modern societies. Without growth, crises ensue; thus, attempts by eco-modernists to claim that economic expansion can be decoupled from environmental degradation are, in his words, “fantasy land.” This illusion is starkly challenged by phenomena such as the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence, whose rapid rise portends escalating energy and resource demands.

To illustrate the material reality underpinning climate change, Professor Swyngedouw provided examples that disrupt the common narrative of an immaterial, post-industrial economy. Internet use, often celebrated for replacing carbon-intensive travel, accounts for approximately 2% of global climate emissions, rivaling aviation. The proliferation of smartphones and tablets adds to this footprint: each device represents 22 kilograms of CO₂ emissions, with over 3.5 billion devices globally. Their manufacture also embodies grim socio-ecological consequences, notably in Central Africa, where coltan mining—vital for ICT equipment—occurs under exploitative and violent conditions, often at the hands of militias and through the involvement of Chinese corporations. Professor Swyngedouw noted the irony that while Western societies discuss “decolonization,” they outsource contemporary extractive imperialism elsewhere, absolving themselves of direct responsibility.

Furthermore, he pointed to the extreme inequality of emissions: the top 10% of emitters are responsible for nearly half of global energy-related CO₂ emissions, while the poorest 10% contribute a mere 0.2%. The richest 0.1% alone emitted ten times more than the rest of the richest 10% combined, exceeding 200 tons of CO₂ per capita annually. These empirical facts reveal a deeply unequal, class-driven structure at the heart of the climate crisis. Yet, Professor Swyngedouw argued, this “real” is systematically disavowed in public discourse, displaced onto fantasies centered on technical management and abstract targets.

This fetishistic disavowal, Professor Swyngedouw explained, allows societies to “know very well” the facts of climate breakdown while continuing to “act as if we do not know.” In this paradox, knowledge itself becomes complicit in maintaining a socio-ecological order premised on endless growth, inequality, and environmental destruction. He warned that unless this structure is confronted, climate discourse will remain trapped in what he called a “populist climate fantasy.”

To move beyond this impasse, Professor Swyngedouw identified two key fantasies that must be transgressed. The first is the dystopian imaginary of an imminent catastrophe that can still be averted. For decades, climate narratives have proclaimed that we are five minutes to midnight, yet never past it, perpetuating an atmosphere of fear that serves neoliberal governance by depoliticizing conflict and presenting climate breakdown as a universal humanitarian threat. This framing enables techno-managerial responses while disavowing the combined and uneven realities of climate impact, where some communities are already experiencing collapse.

The second fantasy revolves around the idea that “humanity” itself is at risk. Professor Swyngedouw questioned the very notion of a singular humanity, pointing to stark global inequalities and conflicts that belie the fiction of a unified global subject. By invoking the danger to an imagined humanity, dominant discourse displaces recognition of the structural antagonisms that produce ecological catastrophe and directs political attention toward generalized, abstract fears.

Professor Swyngedouw underscored that rejecting the apocalyptic narrative—asserting instead that for many, the catastrophe has already occurred—is a necessary step toward politicizing the climate condition. Only by confronting these repressed traumas and dismantling the fantasies that sustain depoliticization can we begin to envision a genuinely transformative ecological politics.

Toward Political Ecologies

Drought in Indonesia: Residents collect murky water from a well in the dried-up reservoir of Kradenan village, Central Java. Photo: Dreamstime.

In this concluding section of his lecture, Professor Swyngedouw advanced a stark and provocative argument: the environmental apocalypse so often framed as an impending future catastrophe has, in fact, already occurred—but unevenly. For many across the world, especially in vulnerable regions, the dystopian conditions of climate collapse are not abstract scenarios but the lived reality of water conflicts, food insecurity, forced displacement, extractivism, and unlivable environments. These conditions, he argued, demonstrate that the “socio-ecological embroglio” has long passed the point of no return.

Professor Swyngedouw insisted that it is precisely this realization—that the apocalypse is both “combined and uneven”—that must become the foundation for any future politics. The comforting idea of returning to some lost Arcadian climate balance, or maintaining a stable global environment, he rejected as a fantasy that displaces the real conflicts and inequalities underlying ecological crisis. Even ostensibly sustainable practices in affluent societies, such as driving an electric vehicle in Amsterdam, are entangled in ecological destruction elsewhere—a global interdependence often obscured.

He then addressed what he termed the second “fantasy”: the very idea of “humanity” as a singular global subject deserving salvation. Drawing on Maurice Blanchot’s critique from the Cold War era, Professor Swyngedouw argued that this notion of humanity is itself a construct, masking deep antagonisms of class and geopolitical violence. From Gaza to Ukraine, the fractured, conflict-ridden nature of the world belies the fantasy of a coherent, unified human community. Professor Swyngedouw called for the construction of a “real humanity”—a project that does not presuppose unity but seeks to forge solidarity from division. Referencing Blanchot, he described this task as “Communism”: the transformative political process of creating humanity where it does not yet exist. 

Conclusion

In concluding his incisive lecture, Professor Erik Swyngedouw left participants of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 with a profound and challenging set of reflections. His critique of contemporary climate discourse invited attendees to reconsider how mainstream and even radical environmental narratives have become complicit in reproducing a depoliticized consensus—a consensus that sustains the very socio-ecological structures responsible for the crisis. By exposing the fetishization of CO₂ reduction as a displacement of attention from systemic drivers like capitalist accumulation and class inequality, Professor Swyngedouw urged a reframing of the climate challenge as a fundamentally political, not merely technical, struggle.

Central to his lecture was the insistence that the environmental apocalypse often depicted as a looming future catastrophe is, in fact, already here—unevenly distributed and deeply entangled with global inequalities. He argued that for millions across the Global South and other marginalized communities, the dystopian conditions of water scarcity, extractivism, forced migration, and environmental degradation are an everyday reality, not an impending threat. Recognizing this uneven, ongoing catastrophe is essential for any honest and transformative political response.

Professor Swyngedouw’s provocative claim that “humanity” itself is a fantasy—masking deep divisions and antagonisms—challenged the audience to reject the comforting notion of a unified global subject requiring salvation. Instead, he called for the active construction of a “real humanity”: a project of solidarity forged from division, attentive to class, geopolitical violence, and the histories of imperialism and exploitation that underpin today’s ecological breakdown.

In sum, this lecture pushed participants to interrogate the ideological architecture of climate populism and reflect on what genuine politicization of the climate condition would entail. It provided not only a critique of prevailing discourses but also an invitation to imagine and enact a more radical, just, and emancipatory ecological politics.

Carnival float showing Greta Thunberg holding the older generation by their ears, symbolizing "Fridays for Future" in Düsseldorf, Germany on March 3, 2019. Photo: Christian Drees.

ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 – Dr. Heidi Hart: Art Attacks – Museum Vandalism as a Populist Response to Climate Trauma?

by ArticlesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHomeReports

Dr. Heidi Hart’s lecture illuminated the provocative intersection of art, activism, and climate trauma. Through an interdisciplinary lens, she explored why climate activists increasingly target iconic artworks in museums as sites of performative protest, interpreting these acts not as mere vandalism but as symbolic disruptions challenging elitist cultural values amid ecological crisis. Drawing on frameworks from populism studies, art history, and affect theory, Dr. Hart examined how these interventions reflect a passionate response to climate grief and injustice. Her analysis underscored the importance of understanding such protests within broader debates on decolonization, posthumanism, and collective responsibility, encouraging participants to view artistic destruction as both a critique of cultural complacency and a call for ecological transformation.

Reported by ECPS Staff

On the third day of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025—titled “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders”—took place online from July 7–11, 2025, participants were treated to a rich and thought-provoking lecture by Dr. Heidi Hart, who offered an interdisciplinary perspective on a particularly provocative theme: the intersection of art vandalism, populist performance, and climate trauma.

Dr. Hart is an arts scholar, curator, and practitioner with a deep commitment to exploring the affective dimensions of ecological crisis through cultural forms. She is based between Copenhagen and North Carolina and holds a Ph.D. in German Studies from Duke University (2016). Her scholarly trajectory spans environmental humanities, climate grief, sound and music in ecological narratives, and the artistic aesthetics of destruction. Among her major works is the recently published monograph Climate Thanatology, which examines artistic engagements with death, loss, and creative transformation in the shadow of climate collapse. Her current research project, Instruments of Repair—supported by the Craftford Foundation—extends this inquiry into the ecological afterlives of musical instruments, analyzing how materials and sound objects decay, renew, and reenter cycles of natural transformation.

Framing the Inquiry

In her lecture, titled “Art Attacks: Museum Vandalism as a Populist Response to Climate Trauma?” Dr. Hart asked two provocative and interrelated questions: Can climate-motivated attacks on cultural heritage be understood as populist interventions? And are such acts animated by collective trauma in response to escalating ecological collapse?

Drawing on her intellectual background in German studies and arts-based environmental research, Dr. Hart invited participants to think critically about what lies behind these acts of museum vandalism—actions that, at first glance, may seem merely destructive but are laden with symbolism and ambiguity. In doing so, she framed her lecture around key themes that set the tone for further discussion: populism, affect, trauma, artistic disruption, and cultural elitism. Through this framing, she encouraged participants to interrogate how contemporary protest blurs boundaries between art and activism, and how cultural heritage itself becomes a site where competing visions of justice, grief, and ecological survival play out.

Dr. Hart began by situating her own intellectual journey—from early research on music as resistance during the Nazi era, where she explored how art could disrupt authoritarian propaganda’s narcotic appeal, to her current focus on the affective and symbolic power of art in the context of environmental crises. This personal trajectory underscored a continuity in her work: a persistent interrogation of how artistic practices can interrupt complacency, provoke reflection, and mobilize engagement.

In today’s context, she argued, museum vandalism by climate activists invites interpretation beyond its surface-level appearance as mere destruction. While many view these actions as disruptive irritations—summarized in a tongue-in-cheek remark she recalled from a recent Oxford symposium, “Everyone hates climate activists”—Dr. Hart challenged participants to probe more deeply: why and how are these interventions disruptive, and could they be productive in drawing attention to the climate emergency?

She acknowledged that her presentation, though informed by her expertise in sound and music, would focus more on visual art, reflecting the prominence of museum spaces as recent sites of climate protest. The lecture’s key themes—populism, trauma, and the aesthetics of disruption—were introduced as analytical frames through which to interrogate these acts of vandalism. Dr. Hart signaled that she would offer preliminary thoughts while leaving ample space for dialogue, emphasizing that these questions remain open and contested.

By foregrounding her inquiry in this way, Dr. Hart set the stage for a rich exploration of not only whether climate activist vandalism constitutes a populist response but also how it may serve as an expression of collective climate grief and a critique of cultural elitism. This framing invited participants to think critically about the ambiguous and provocative role of art in times of ecological crisis and political polarization.

Museum Vandalism as Performative Protest

Dr. Hart discussed recent attacks on artworks, including pink paint on Picasso’s Le Tête in Montreal, pea soup on Van Gogh’s The Sower in Rome, and black paint on Klimt’s Death and Life in Vienna.

In her lecture, Dr. Hart has drew attentions to a striking phenomenon that has emerged in recent years: the vandalism of iconic artworks by climate activist groups. Framing these incidents as potential cases of “performative protest,” Dr. Hart explored not only their aesthetic shock value but their underlying motivations and rhetorical strategies, situating these acts within broader cultural and political debates.

She began by providing concrete examples of such actions. In 2022, museum vandalism became a prominent feature of climate activism, with protesters targeting cultural masterpieces in acts carefully calibrated for visibility. Dr. Hart discussed a recent attack in Montreal, where pink paint was thrown at Picasso’s Le Tête. Other high-profile incidents included activists hurling pea soup at Van Gogh’s The Sower in Rome, and black paint splashed on Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life in Vienna. These actions, though dramatic, typically did not cause irreversible damage. As Dr. Hart noted, most of these targeted paintings were protected by glass or varnish, meaning the interventions were more symbolic than materially destructive.

Yet, the symbolism itself was deeply provocative. The activists’ chosen targets were canonical works—artworks regarded as cultural treasures—imbued with historical and aesthetic value. The protests’ visual violence demanded attention but also raised questions about the meaning of “treasuring” art in an age of ecological collapse. Dr. Hart highlighted the activists’ rhetorical position: Why admire art while the planet burns? For these groups, art becomes a symbol of elitism and privilege, and their interventions serve to challenge that perceived complacency.

Who perpetrates these actions? Dr. Hart shared that the vast majority—about 95%—are carried out by organized groups, typically operating within their own countries and avoiding long-distance air travel for environmental reasons. Three major groups—Ultima Generazione in Italy and the Vatican, Just Stop Oil in the UK, and Letzte Generation in Germany—account for over half of such incidents globally. These groups share coordination mechanisms, including networks like “A22,” and their communications reflect a shared sense of existential urgency. As their manifesto proclaims: “The old world is dying. We are in the last hour. What we do now decides the fate of this world and the next.”

Dr. Hart unpacked the dramatic language used by these groups, noting how their invocation of being the “last generation” implies both despair and futurity. On one hand, their rhetoric signals apocalyptic loss—both ecological and cultural—while on the other it invokes protection of generations yet to come. Their critique extends beyond climate change itself to the cultural frameworks that structure inaction: museums and artworks become proxies for a broader critique of elite indifference to planetary crisis.

The lecture also probed the deeper ideological terrain of these protests, linking them to contemporary struggles over rights discourse. Dr. Hart reflected on how activist groups claim an “inalienable right” to protest through disruptive means—a phrase that resonates with the language of populism on both the left and right. In today’s polarized context, she observed, concepts like “freedom” and “rights” are highly contingent, shifting according to political alignment. Where once calls for “freedom” in the US were often heard from right-wing movements opposing government regulation, the post-2024 political landscape has seen left-leaning groups appropriating the same rhetoric to resist new authoritarian currents.

Thus, these acts of museum vandalism reflect not only artistic disruption but also a contest over language itself—over what rights mean, who can claim them, and in what contexts. Dr. Hart emphasized that the activist invocation of freedom and rights is part of a wider populist dynamic that questions authority and elite cultural spaces, even as it seeks to defend collective planetary futures.

Dr. Hart’s exploration of climate activist vandalism revealed these actions as complex, ambiguous performances: visually disruptive yet materially restrained, symbolically powerful yet ideologically contested. By probing their underlying motivations, rhetorical strategies, and populist dimensions, she invited participants to view these protests not simply as acts of destruction but as calls for attention to deeper crises of climate, culture, and democracy itself.

Populist Dynamics and Iconoclash

Dr. Heidi Hart shared insights from her forthcoming book Piano Decompositions, exploring how broken or abandoned instruments—burning pianos, rotting harps—become ecological sites.

In her lecture, Dr. Hart also offered an expansive reflection on the relationship between contemporary climate activism, populist dynamics, and artistic practice, emphasizing how recent acts of vandalism against artworks in museums embody complex cultural and ideological tensions. Dr. Hart examined why some climate activists engage in such performative protests, throwing substances on masterpieces as a way to challenge the cultural hierarchies that museums symbolize.

She framed this as a populist gesture, drawing on arguments in the Encyclopedia of New Populism (2024), which describe left-oriented populist activists viewing museum art as symbolic of elitism. These artworks, attributed with immense monetary and cultural value, are seen to set apart a privileged cultural elite (“them”) from the general public (“us”). For these activists, museums become metaphoric “ivory towers,” and vandalism functions as a provocative performance rather than a reactionary outburst. In this framing, the splashing of paint or soup on a painting is not mere destruction, but a deliberate disruption aimed at exposing what they perceive as misplaced societal priorities in a time of environmental crisis.

Dr. Hart then broadened this inquiry by situating these acts within an evolving discourse in the art world itself. Museums today are increasingly sites of reflection on their own complicity in colonial histories, leading to active debates about “decolonizing the museum.” Many institutions are critically reassessing their collections—particularly artifacts acquired during imperial periods—and grappling with ethical questions of provenance and restitution.

Closely linked to these debates is the burgeoning discourse of posthumanism, another current Dr. Hart identified as central to understanding the contemporary art world. Posthumanism, she explained, takes two key forms: one engages with technological transformation, contemplating the future of humanity in an age of AI and bodily augmentation; the other de-centers humans as the central agents in history and culture, emphasizing human entanglement with non-human animals, ecosystems, and material forces. This second strand, Dr. Hart noted, deeply informs the proliferation of artworks today that abandon traditional materials like oil paint and canvas in favor of organic or ephemeral substances—horsehair, moss, soil, cultivated bacteria—all signaling a shift away from an anthropocentric worldview.

In this context, Dr. Hart suggested that climate activist vandalism tends not to target contemporary works that already embrace this ecological sensitivity. Instead, activists have focused on older, canonical works of art that are emblematic of human exceptionalism and Western aesthetic traditions. Their interventions thus function as a critique of a cultural legacy that they see as complicit in ecological extraction and exploitation.

Returning to the theme of populism, Dr. Hart introduced the work of political theorist Chantal Mouffe, whose book Toward a Green Democratic Revolution: Left Populism and the Power of Affects argues that left populism is a vital mode for mobilizing collective political will in the face of ecological collapse. For Mouffe, affective energy—passion, anger, grief—must be harnessed not just as protest but also channeled into institutional processes like voting and policymaking. Dr. Hart affirmed that Mouffe’s ideas offer a strong theoretical justification for interpreting climate activist actions as populist interventions aimed at reconfiguring democratic priorities around ecological survival.

However, Dr. Hart was careful to draw an important distinction between left populist climate activism and right-wing eco-fascism. Though both can appear populist in form, their ideological contents diverge dramatically. Eco-fascism, she observed, is often animated by a Malthusian impulse to restrict human populations, frequently tied to racialized or exclusionary worldviews—a “protection of the earth” that serves a narrowly defined community, often coded as white. In contrast, left populist climate activism typically expresses solidarity with all humans and non-humans alike, animated by a vision of ecological justice that centers collective responsibility and inclusivity.

An instructive example here is the “seven-generation principle,” drawn from Indigenous philosophies, which advises that every decision be made with consideration for its impact on seven generations to come. Dr. Hart explained that this principle encapsulates a form of temporality and collectivity that stands in stark opposition to the extractive logic of neoliberal capitalism. Where eco-fascists would advocate reducing populations to “protect” the earth, left populists call for an expanded, solidaristic ecology that embraces future human and non-human lives alike.

Dr. Hart then turned to the language of passion and affect in this context. While critics often dismiss passion as unstructured and chaotic, Mouffe and others argue that passion is essential for building a political project powerful enough to challenge entrenched structures of extraction and domination. Activism in museums, from this perspective, should not be seen as mindless vandalism but as part of a broader affective politics—a politics that seeks to reorient collective attention from cultural elitism to planetary emergency.

Dr. Hart continued her lecture by introducing the provocative concept of iconoclash, coined by French philosopher Bruno Latour. Distinct from “iconoclasm,” which implies a clear intent to destroy sacred images, iconoclash suggests a productive ambiguity: an act that simultaneously destroys and provokes reflection. When activists splash paint on canonical artworks, they may not seek to obliterate their cultural value outright but to force a public reconsideration of what those values signify at this moment of ecological precarity.

This framing resonates with Dr. Hart’s own scholarly and artistic work. She shared insights from her forthcoming book Piano Decompositions: The Ecology of Destroyed and Decaying Instruments, co-authored with Beata Schirrmacher, which explores how broken or abandoned instruments—burning pianos, rotting harps—become ecological sites in their own right. A decaying harp in her own backyard, she explained, has become home to spiders and plants, its strings transformed into webs, its wooden frame absorbing rain and wind. Such work re-embeds cultural artifacts into natural cycles of decay and regeneration, proposing destruction itself as a mode of ecological engagement.

In this light, Dr. Hart suggested, climate activist attacks on canonical artworks might also be understood not simply as negations but as attempts to transform how society values cultural and material artifacts—raising questions about what should be preserved, what should be mourned, and what should be allowed to return to the earth.

Trauma, Affect, and Eco-Populism

Dr. Heidi Hart reflected on the power of artistic ambiguity to address ecological crisis, highlighting the Icelandic film Woman at War and its eco-warrior protagonist’s complex duality.

Moreover, Dr. Hart addressed the psychological and emotional dimensions underlying acts of climate activism that target cultural institutions, focusing on the role of trauma and affect. She posed a central question: Are these destructive actions simply about drawing attention to the climate crisis, or do they emerge from an emotional intensity—what Chantal Mouffe describes as a passion driven by collective hurt and grief over ecological loss?

Dr. Hart cited Catherine Stiles’s work on destruction art as a useful lens, noting that such artistic interventions can be seen as a visual expression of the trauma of survival itself. According to Stiles, destruction art embodies the precarious condition of human survival in the 20th and 21st centuries, echoing broader existential anxieties that are increasingly acute amid escalating climate disruptions.

Dr. Hart also referenced Ian Kaplan’s Climate Trauma, a study exploring dystopian narratives across film and fiction, as further evidence of how popular culture processes this collective sense of impending ecological catastrophe. She observed that dystopian imaginaries reflect an implicit recognition that the world as we know it has already ended—a powerful backdrop for understanding the emotional logic of activist vandalism.

Drawing connections to current events, Dr. Hart emphasized that even those not directly affected by disasters like recent floods in Texas experience a form of mediated trauma through relentless news coverage. This ambient, cumulative distress, particularly among younger generations contemplating their futures, helps explain why destructive activism may increasingly be motivated not only by strategic intent but also by genuine emotional exhaustion and eco-anxiety.

In concluding her lecture, Dr. Heidi Hart offered a compelling reflection on the potential of artistic ambiguity and creative narratives to engage with ecological crisis in ways that transcend binary thinking. She highlighted the Icelandic film Woman at War (2013) as an exemplar of this approach, noting how its protagonist—a passionate eco-warrior—embodies a complex duality: she actively sabotages industrial infrastructure in Iceland while also serving as a beloved choir director in Reykjavík, deeply invested in her community and the arts.

Dr. Hart described how the film explores the interplay between destruction and creativity, emphasizing the ambiguity at its core. Throughout the film, a roving ensemble of musicians appears in unexpected settings—on hillsides, in the protagonist’s apartment, at an airport runway—blurring the lines between reality and imagination, and inviting viewers to question the role of art and music during times of crisis. This device creates a distancing effect that allows for reflection on art’s relevance when ecological and social structures are under threat. She also pointed out how the film weaves in another narrative thread: the protagonist’s pending adoption of a child from Ukraine, adding further layers of ethical complexity around responsibility, personal obligations, and global injustice.

Dr. Hart praised the film’s ability to offer hope without sacrificing complexity or humor. She encouraged participants to consider creative, less binary ways of thinking about activism, destruction, and repair, and left them with key questions: Can we understand these acts as a form of left-wing populism? Are they rooted in trauma? And can artful destruction productively draw attention to planetary crisis?

Conclusion

Dr. Heidi Hart’s lecture for the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 offered participants a rich and provocative framework for understanding contemporary climate activism’s engagement with art, populism, and trauma. By tracing the phenomenon of museum vandalism through multiple analytical lenses—political, cultural, and affective—she challenged easy dismissals of such acts as mere nihilism or spectacle. Instead, she invited participants to interpret these performative protests as complex interventions that reflect an urgent critique of cultural elitism, a contest over the meaning of “rights” and “freedom,” and a passionate response to collective eco-anxiety.

Throughout her talk, Dr. Hart emphasized the importance of nuance and ambiguity. She invoked Bruno Latour’s concept of “iconoclash” to describe how these interventions simultaneously destroy and provoke reflection, suggesting that climate activist vandalism compels society to reconsider what it treasures, preserves, or lets decay. Drawing on her own research on the ecology of destroyed instruments, she extended this theme to propose that destruction itself can become a creative act—reembedding human culture within natural cycles of decay and renewal.

In concluding, Dr. Hart highlighted the Icelandic film Woman at War as a hopeful model for thinking beyond binaries of destruction versus creativity, or human versus nature. She encouraged participants to explore how affective politics, populist passion, and artistic ambiguity might offer new modes of engaging with ecological crisis.