Professor Francisco Rodríguez is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Faculty Affiliate at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies.

Prof. Rodríguez: Venezuela Is No Longer About Venezuela, It’s About Demonstrating Power

by Editor’s ChoiceForeign PolicyHomeInterviewsLeadership & Persona

Giving an interview to the ECPS, Professor Francisco Rodríguez argues that today “Venezuela is no longer about Venezuela; it is about demonstrating power.” He reassesses Chavismo’s constitutional refoundation, noting that “not even the most hardline opponents of Chavismo question the Constitution today,” while stressing that redistribution collapsed when oil rents vanished: “The model of oil-rent redistribution simply does not work if there are no rents to distribute.” Professor Rodríguez highlights the durability of moral antagonism—“us versus them”—and shows how social policy can operate as rule: “We bring you food; we take care of your family’s needs.” Crucially, he links the post-Maduro landscape to Delcy Rodríguez’s room for maneuver, arguing that if she can claim Washington is no longer backing the opposition, she can frame Maduro’s seizure as “a strategic victory.” Yet he warns that US demands for “power-sharing with the opposition” would be “deeply problematic for Chavismo.” He concludes that Trump’s approach is transactional: “not demanding political reform… [but] asking Venezuela to sell oil.”

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Francisco Rodríguez—Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Faculty Affiliate at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies—offers a comprehensive analysis of Venezuela’s post-Maduro political trajectory. Situating the case at the intersection of populist state resilience, authoritarian adaptation, and shifting US power strategies, Professor Rodríguez advances a stark diagnosis: “Venezuela is no longer about Venezuela; it is about demonstrating power.” In his account, the country has become a geopolitical signal—a site through which coercive capacity, transactional hegemony, and the limits of democratic opposition are being tested.

Professor Rodríguez begins by reassessing the foundational pillars of the Chávez-era project—constitutional refoundation, oil-rent redistribution, and the moralization of politics—arguing that these were not merely leader-centered strategies but elements of a durable populist state architecture capable of surviving leadership decapitation. While personally critical of the 1999 Constitution, he notes that “not even the most hardline opponents of Chavismo question the Constitution today,” underscoring how deeply constitutional refoundation has been absorbed into Venezuela’s political ethos. Even critics, he observes, now invoke the Constitution “as a model that the Maduro government is failing to uphold.”

On political economy, Professor Rodríguez emphasizes that populist redistribution depends on material abundance. “The model of oil-rent redistribution simply does not work if there are no rents to distribute,” he argues, pointing to a 93 percent collapse in oil revenues between 2012 and 2020. This collapse, compounded by US sanctions, forced the regime toward pragmatic—and even neoliberal—adjustments, not as a matter of ideological conversion but constraint. As Professor Rodríguez puts it, the economy remained closed “not because the government didn’t want it open, but because the United States government didn’t allow it.”

A central theme throughout the interview is the durability of moralized politics. Chavismo’s framing of politics as an existential struggle between “the people” and apátridas (stateless persons in Spanish/Portuguese, S.C) continues to structure both regime and opposition behavior. Professor Rodríguez cautions that this antagonistic grammar cannot be easily abandoned, particularly because “the opposition has also embraced a moralized framework, albeit from the opposite angle.” This mutual entrenchment helps explain why moments that might have enabled institutional cohabitation—most notably the opposition’s 2015 parliamentary victory—instead produced escalation and breakdown.

Within this transformed landscape, Professor Rodríguez devotes particular attention to Delcy Rodríguez’s room for maneuver. He argues that her political viability now hinges on whether she can credibly claim that Washington is no longer backing the opposition. Under those conditions, Maduro’s seizure can be reframed as “a strategic victory,” preserving Chavismo’s narrative of confrontation. At the same time, Professor Rodríguez warns that any US demand for “power-sharing with the opposition” would be “deeply problematic for Chavismo,” requiring a fundamental rewriting of its moral and institutional grammar.

The interview culminates in Professor Rodríguez’s assessment of US intervention under Donald Trump. Contrary to expectations, Trump did not demand democratization or power transfer, but oil. “What Trump is effectively doing now is not demanding political reform,” Professor Rodríguez explains; “he is asking Venezuela to sell oil to the United States.” This approach reflects a broader logic of informal empire: “It is more efficient to rule through domestic elites who follow US directives than to administer the country directly.” In this sense, Venezuela becomes less a national case than a global message—one that signals the new rules of transactional power, and the risks they pose for democratic oppositions worldwide.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Francisco Rodríguez, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Between ‘Us Versus Them’ and External Power: Chavismo After Maduro

Chavez-Maduro
Iconic sites in central Caracas, where buildings are decorated with murals promoted by the Chávez and Maduro governments. Photo: Dreamstime.

Professor Francisco Rodríguez, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start with the first question: With Nicolás Maduro removed yet the Chavista state apparatus largely intact, how should we reinterpret the foundational choices of the Chávez era—constitutional refoundation, oil-rent redistribution, and the moralization of politics—as elements of a populist state project capable of surviving leadership decapitation?

Professor Francisco Rodríguez: First of all, thank you very much for having me, and thank you for the opportunity to have a conversation about Venezuela and its populist model and evolution. Let me start by addressing the three aspects you mention. One of them is the Constitution. To a certain extent, constitutional refoundation is something Chavismo achieved quite remarkably, and it has become deeply ingrained in the Venezuelan ethos. The evidence for this is that there is very little, if any, discussion among Venezuela’s political actors about the need to change the Constitution. This is not to say that I think the current Constitution is good. On the contrary, I am quite critical of the way it expands executive power, and I believe that reform in this area will be necessary. But the reality is that not even the most hardline opponents of Chavismo question the Constitution today. In fact, they often invoke it as a model that the Maduro government is failing to uphold.

Turning to the other two points you raised—moralization of politics and oil rents—I think what we have seen over the past few years, roughly over the past decade, is that the model of oil-rent redistribution simply does not work if there are no rents to distribute. In Venezuela, those rents effectively disappeared. Oil revenues declined by 93 percent between 2012 and 2020. They have recovered somewhat since then, but they remain around 75 percent lower than their peak in 2012. As a result, the government has far fewer resources to redistribute, and, to some extent, it has already been forced to move toward a neoliberal policy paradigm. The main reason it has not gone further in that direction is that the economy has been under sanctions, which has prevented the implementation of some basic elements of the neoliberal model, such as opening the economy to foreign investment. This closure was not due to a lack of willingness on the government’s part, but rather because the United States government did not allow it.

Moralized Politics, External Pressure, and Strategic Uncertainty

This brings us to the third point: the demoralization of politics. This is something Chavismo will have to grapple with and much depends on how the current intervention evolves. Chavismo’s narrative has long been one of moralization—of us versus them—casting its opponents as apátridas, people without a sense of the fatherland. This narrative was effective over the past decade, during a period of open confrontation with the United States. But what has happened now is that the US has prevailed, in the sense that it has imposed its power on Venezuela and compelled Venezuelan authorities to react according to its dictates. Venezuelan authorities are therefore no longer acting autonomously. How do they sustain this narrative under these conditions? In the two weeks since Maduro’s seizure, they have been playing a dual game: complying with US demands while simultaneously maintaining the narrative that Maduro has been kidnapped and must be returned. In this way, they can still preserve the idea of confrontation.

The problem—and we will probably return to this later—is that this confrontation has its own dynamics. It is not something Chavismo can easily abandon, because the opposition has also embraced a moralized framework, albeit from the opposite angle: an “us versus them” discourse that pits the good against the bad, or decent society against a corrupt criminal mafia. This is not a narrative that can be changed at will. Yet if, for example, as a White House spokesperson suggested —and as President Trump has hinted—a White House visit by Delcy Rodríguez is being contemplated, it will become very difficult to sustain that confrontational narrative.

This leads to the final question: is there a way for Chavismo to continue evolving, and what will its core narrative be? Is this a strategic retreat—a case of “we have to do this to defend the project”? Or does it mean abandoning some of the project’s foundational tenets altogether?

It Is Too Early to Tell Whether Adaptation Will Become Strategy

Hugo Chávez
Late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez attended the ceremony marking the laying of the foundation stone for a monument to Simón Bolívar in Moscow, Russia on October 15, 2010. Photo: Dreamstime.[/caption]

In your work, you highlight how Chavismo constructed politics as a moral antagonism between “the people” and existential enemies. After Maduro’s seizure, does this moralized populist logic appear less as a contingent discursive strategy and more as a durable institutional grammar that shaped courts, security forces, and rent allocation?

Professor Francisco Rodríguez: I am tempted to respond as Zhou Enlai is said to have responded to a question about the French Revolution: it is too early to tell. It later emerged that the question was lost in translation and was actually about the May ’68 revolts, but the answer certainly applies here as well. What we are seeing now is very short-term adaptation to external circumstances, which, depending on how events unfold, may later be interpreted as strategic. Let me illustrate this with the example of Chávez after the 2002 coup.

After returning to power following the 2002 coup, Chávez adopted a very conciliatory tone. He even asked for forgiveness for his previous attitude, acknowledging that he should not have fired the PDVSA (Venezuela’s state oil company) managers in the manner he did—an episode widely perceived as humiliating, or at least framed that way by Chávez himself. Crucially, at that moment he also acceded to the main demand of economic elites: changing the economic cabinet. He brought in a group of pragmatists to run the economy, and they remained in place for about a year. One year later, however, Jorge Giordani—Chávez’s chief architect and ideologue—was back in charge of economic policy.

Some interpret this episode as Chávez merely playing along, and there is certainly some truth to that. But there is also another dimension, linked to the enduring dynamics of confrontation. That economic cabinet survived through the general strike and the oil strike against Chávez and was only replaced once Chávez concluded that he was back in confrontation mode—that the opposition was again trying to overthrow him—and that he therefore needed a command economy capable of asserting control over oil resources. This entailed abandoning efforts to accommodate the private sector. If we look back at that moment, Chávez imposed exchange controls in January 2003 during the oil strike, but crucially, he did not lift them once the strike ended. In effect, he shifted from a strategy of trying to bring the private sector into a governing coalition and broadening his base of support to one centered on confrontation: controlling oil rents and disciplining the private sector through control of those rents and access to foreign exchange.

Trump Is Not Demanding Reform—He Is Asking for Oil

One of the key uncertainties today is how the United States will proceed. US policy will shape many of the constraints facing Venezuela. If the US were to station warships off Venezuela’s coast and dictate terms, Venezuela would have little room to maneuver. But this is a somewhat unusual version of coercion coming from the Trump administration. President Trump’s first administration was the one that stopped buying oil from Venezuela. What Trump is effectively doing now is not demanding political reform, elections, or the transfer of power to María Corina Machado. Instead, he is asking Venezuela to sell oil to the United States—something Venezuelan authorities had long been asking Trump to permit. This is not a demand that makes the Delcy Rodríguez regime uncomfortable.

To the extent that Venezuelan authorities can establish a working relationship with the Trump administration, and as long as Washington maintains this stance, the moral and institutional grammar you describe is likely to persist. This episode can easily be framed as yet another chapter in the “us versus them” struggle. It is important to recall that Chavismo’s confrontation has never primarily been with the United States, but rather with the domestic opposition and economic elites. If Delcy Rodríguez can credibly claim that Venezuela has won US support and that Washington is no longer backing the opposition, she can present this as a strategic victory. She does not need to deny that Maduro’s capture was problematic; she only needs to frame it as having defeated the opposition on that front.

Under those conditions, the discourse of confrontation would be preserved and would continue to be embedded in Venezuelan institutions. The real difficulty would arise if the US were to change course and demand power-sharing with the opposition. That scenario would be deeply problematic for Chavismo. While it might still be manageable, it would be extraordinarily difficult to justify to supporters. It would be just as challenging for Delcy Rodríguez as for María Corina Machado to explain why they should cooperate, why they should sit at the same table. Such a shift would require a profound rewriting of the moral narrative and the institutional grammar that accompanies it, because any genuine power-sharing arrangement would have to extend into the institutions themselves. That would represent a fundamentally different political game from the one Chavismo has played over the past quarter century.

María Corina Machado
Venezuelan opposition leader and ousted lawmaker María Corina Machado during a street protest movement of civil insurrection against the government of Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, Venezuela, 2017. Photo: Edgloris Marys.

The Difference Between Chávez and Maduro Is Abundance, Not Personality

From a populism studies perspective; to what extent did Chavismo succeed in transforming a charismatic, plebiscitary project into a post-charismatic regime—one in which moral legitimacy, clientelism, and coercion became routinized within the state itself?

Professor Francisco Rodríguez: That’s a great question. It is tempting to focus on the contrasting personalities of Chávez and Maduro, but I would place much greater emphasis on material and economic constraints. Chávez governed during an era of abundance. When he came to power, Venezuelan oil was selling for about $9 a barrel; by the time he died, it was selling for more than $100.

Those rents later collapsed for two main reasons. The first was the sharp decline in oil prices between 2014 and 2016. The second was the political crisis triggered by that collapse, which led, among other things, to US economic sanctions. This raises an unavoidable counterfactual question—one that is necessarily subjective: how would Chávez have reacted to the complete erosion of rents? Would he have behaved differently from Maduro? My view is that he probably would not have.

Had Chávez found himself unable to win elections and facing both a hostile domestic opposition and a US government effectively seeking his removal, I believe he would have become just as repressive as Maduro. There is little in Chávez’s governing style to suggest otherwise. We need only recall the period leading up to the 2004 recall referendum, when Chávez used the Maisanta list to regulate access to public employment in a highly clientelist manner—shoring up support before the vote and intimidating not so much committed opposition voters as potentially neutral citizens and public employees who might have contemplated opposing him. In that sense, similar dynamics would likely have prevailed under Chávez.

That said, as an economist, I am not best equipped—nor is my discipline particularly well suited—to analyze questions of popular or leader charisma. What I can say is that Chávez’s association with a period of prosperity, driven by oil rents and reflected in improvements in living conditions and social indicators through expansive social spending, would likely have made the ensuing crisis resemble Cuba’s “Special Period.” The enduring memory of better times, and of restored dignity and living standards for many of the poor, might have been sufficient to sustain Chávez’s support—something Maduro has been unable to claim.

Chavismo Was Surprised by the Scale of Its Own Electoral Defeat

This contrast is still evident in public opinion today: Chávez remains widely popular, while Maduro does not. As a result, Maduro has relied far more heavily on coercion and institutional control, a tendency that reached an extreme in the 2024 elections, when the government concluded that it had no option but to brazenly steal the vote. Ironically, the fact that Maduro resorted to fraud suggests that he believed victory was still possible. This episode marked a moment when Chavismo was genuinely surprised by the depth of its loss of popular support.

It is important to stress, however, that this surprise did not stem from ignorance of opinion polls or a failure to monitor public sentiment. Careful readings of polling data suggested the election would be relatively close. Nor was it due to an inability to track electoral performance in real time; the government possesses a fairly robust system for doing so, which led it to believe it had mobilized roughly five million votes—enough to make the contest tight even under the opposition’s most favorable assumptions.

What Chavismo was not prepared for was the possibility that, of those five million mobilized voters, around one million would ultimately vote not for Maduro but for Edmundo González. In that moment, the very structures the regime had built revealed their limits. Returning to your question, this suggests that mechanisms of coercion were not fully routinized. They had been routinized for a long period during which they functioned effectively, as evidenced in 2021, when the opposition participated in elections, European Union observers were present, and the government swept the regional contests. At that time, the clientelist model worked.

By 2024, however, something had shifted. That structural break is precisely what the model—one that had kept Maduro in power for twelve years—is now struggling to confront.

CLAPs, Causality, and the Mechanics of Populist Rule

Given that Chávez-era distributive systems continue to function after Maduro’s removal, how should we reassess social policy not merely as welfare provision but as a populist technology of rule—and what does your work on targeted benefits tell us about how redistribution becomes a mechanism of political loyalty under authoritarian populism?

Professor Francisco Rodríguez: I think it is important for me to explain briefly what my work does and what it does not do. This relates, in part, to the broader conversation between economics and the social sciences and to what economists typically try to accomplish. We generally aim to identify causal effects. In my World Development paper on how clientelism works, I use a natural experiment—the repetition of elections in the Venezuelan state of Barinas—to evaluate how social transfers respond to elections. More specifically, I examine the effect of electoral competitiveness on social transfers.

To do so, I use the government’s food package distribution system—the Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAPs). What I find is quite interesting. When this natural experiment is used to identify causal effects, the results show that, as a consequence of the election, social benefits were targeted more toward median voters—those located in the middle of the political spectrum. This has important implications for the standard narrative on populism. Much of the literature assumes that government supporters are more likely to receive social benefits. That is true as a correlation, as a descriptive statistic, and that point is undeniable. But descriptive statistics are not the same as causal effects. This pattern may exist because the government is actively targeting its followers, but it may also exist because supporters are more likely to self-select into these programs.

It is easy to find anecdotal evidence of opposition supporters saying, “I’m not going to take a food package from the government; I’m not going to give them my information, because that allows them to control me. I don’t like that food; I think it’s poor-quality or even dangerous.” This behavior must be disentangled from other causal factors, such as income differences. Pro-opposition supporters tend to have higher incomes and can therefore more easily opt out of these programs. That disentangling is precisely what the causal experiment helps to achieve.

Between Welfare and Control

So, it is one thing to say that the government uses these programs electorally to target median voters, which is what my paper demonstrates. But it is also important to recognize that, descriptively, government supporters still tend to be the main beneficiaries of these programs. Another key finding in the data is that when people are asked, “Why are you getting CLAP boxes?” or “Why are you not getting CLAP boxes?”, the overwhelming majority respond, “I’m getting them because I registered,” or “I’m not getting them because I didn’t register.” Very few respondents—less than 10 percent—say, “I’m getting them because I support the government,” or “because I have friends in the government,” or “I’m not getting them because I’m not on the government’s side.”

This means that the system is politically targeted, but not necessarily in the way it is often assumed. As a result, voters’ reactions to it are also quite different from what is commonly presumed. In many respects, it appears as the state doing what it is expected to do: delivering food to people and to families. In another paper that I am about to publish in a collection with the Inter-American Development Bank, we estimate the calorie effect of the CLAP program and find it to be substantial—around 500 calories per person. In the context of a massive economic collapse, that can make the difference between famine and the avoidance of famine.

What we are seeing, then, diverges in important ways from standard assumptions. There are, of course, other mechanisms of control. The Carnet de la Patria, for example, operates much more in the classic quid pro quo clientelist manner: if you support me, you receive a monetary transfer. The government uses cash in this way, and it is often considered legitimate for it to do so. As Maduro once explicitly stated during a campaign speech, “This is dando y dando—you give, I give.” He was referring not to CLAP boxes, but to cash transfer programs.

How Everyday Welfare Became a Source of Regime Resilience

At the same time, there is another set of programs that is essentially universalistic. Even if these programs can be politically targeted for strategic reasons, they are universalistic in the sense that everyone is presumed to have access to them, and in practice, those who want access can obtain it. This closely resembles how the Misiones functioned under Chávez, or programs such as Misión Mercal. No one was asked for a government ID card or a Socialist Party card to buy subsidized food at Mercal supermarkets. You simply went in. Yet when you entered the store, saw the staff, and examined the packaging, it was clear that there was political messaging. The implicit message was that the government was doing good things for you. In this sense, it is comparable to Donald Trump signing COVID relief checks and sending them out as personal checks.

My view, then, is that when we try to understand why Chavismo’s popularity—and even Maduro’s support—has remained at around 30 percent, which appears to be roughly what he obtained in the election, we need to ask why, in the context of such a severe economic crisis, it did not fall to 10 percent. In Peru, for example, presidents often have single-digit approval ratings. Why did this not happen in Venezuela? Why was the revolution, in that sense, so resilient? The answer lies in its continued ability to build sources of legitimation, largely by conveying the idea that the state is being administered for you and on your behalf. Even amid economic crisis, the message remains: we are doing our job; we bring you food; we take care of your family’s needs.

When the Model Didn’t Change—but the Conditions Did

The persistence of Chavista governance raises questions about personalism. In retrospect, where do you see the key discontinuities between Chávez and Maduro—particularly regarding elite cohesion, coercive capacity, and the role of elections as rituals of legitimation rather than mechanisms of accountability?

Professor Francisco Rodríguez: Here again, I would return to the counterfactual I mentioned earlier: how different is what we are seeing now from what we might have seen under Chávez had he faced an economic crisis similar to the one Maduro confronted? My view is that the differences are not as pronounced as they are often assumed to be. I do not see major discontinuities in the political model itself, or even in the modes of governance. Many of the apparent discontinuities are better explained by external factors—most notably the collapse of oil revenues and the imposition of economic sanctions, both of which emerged from a particular evolution of the political conflict. That evolution did not stem from the imposition of a fundamentally different governing model, but rather from a deeper issue: the absence of compromise as a viable option within the political culture.

If there is a moment that can be identified as truly decisive—and again, this is not because Maduro is fundamentally different from Chávez—it is the opposition’s victory of a supermajority in the 2015 parliamentary elections, a result that Chavismo initially accepted. The government did not annul or steal the elections and formally recognized the outcome. It did, however, challenge the election of several legislators from the state of Amazonas, a move that ultimately deprived the opposition of its supermajority. That supermajority would have enabled the opposition to initiate proceedings against the Supreme Court or convene a constituent assembly. In that sense, it was a kind of nuclear option, and Chavismo neutralized it by invalidating those legislative seats, while still allowing the opposition to retain a simple majority.

In almost any political system, one would then expect negotiations over cohabitation to follow. Typically, a government in that position would approach the legislature and say, “Let’s work this out. Let’s find a way to govern together. What do you want, and what do we want?” But no such effort was made—by either side. There are, after all, different ways of operating within a political system. One is through negotiation; another is through economic incentives or coercion, which governments routinely employ. Minority parties are bought off; opposition blocs are peeled apart. The government controls the state apparatus and oil rents and can easily approach opposition legislators individually or target small centrist parties, offering ministerial posts or control over specific policy areas—housing, the environment, minority rights. These are standard political tools.

Moral Antagonism and the Breakdown of Political Compromise

In this case, the government had two basic options. It could have sat down with the opposition coalition to negotiate a coexistence arrangement that would allow governance and the passage of legislation. Alternatively, it could have pursued a piecemeal strategy, fragmenting the opposition to construct a working majority. Maduro did neither, and the opposition likewise refused to engage in such processes.

This is where I would locate the core problem. I would hesitate to call it a discontinuity in the political model itself, but it was certainly a discontinuity in outcomes. The system was simply not designed to operate under a constitutional arrangement that required cohabitation. And this is not unique to Chavismo. It reflects a deeper feature of Venezuelan political history. During the democratic period that began in 1958, parliamentary and presidential elections were held simultaneously, ensuring that presidents almost always governed with a compliant Congress. The lone exception was in 1993, when Rafael Caldera won the presidency with only a plurality, leaving his party without congressional control and forcing some form of accommodation.

The belief that governments do not need to negotiate with the opposition is deeply ingrained in Venezuelan political culture. That is where the system—on both sides—ultimately breaks down. And it breaks down, once again, because of the politics of moral antagonism we discussed earlier. How can you justify governing alongside an actor you have portrayed as an existential enemy, as the embodiment of unpatriotic or immoral behavior? You cannot. Neither side could.

This dynamic was evident on the opposition side as well. When Henry Ramos Allup assumed the presidency of the National Assembly, he announced that the opposition would seek a constitutional route to remove Maduro from office within six months. In effect, he was openly advocating regime change. Both sides were locked into this confrontational mode, and their inability to move beyond it precipitated the escalation of the political conflict—ultimately leading to the adoption of scorched-earth strategies that inflicted severe damage on the economy.

From Democratic Opposition to Zero-Sum Politics

And finally, Professor Rodríguez, drawing on your New York Times analysis of Machado’s hardliner identity—including the symbolic handing over of her Nobel Peace Prize medal to President Trump—what does this episode reveal about the risks of moral absolutism, charismatic personalization, and alignment with coercive external power in populist contexts? More broadly, what does the Venezuelan case tell us about Trump’s transactional approach to authoritarian regimes and the dangers it poses for democratic oppositions elsewhere?

Professor Francisco Rodríguez: It is a very revealing episode because it encapsulates a central dilemma in opposition politics. Moderates within the opposition struggle to mobilize voters around their projects and are highly vulnerable to being denounced as collaborationists or as having been co-opted by the government. As a result, moderate opposition figures tend to reach a political dead end. Once they attempt to articulate an alternative based on compromise, they quickly lose momentum.

Returning to my earlier point about confrontation as part of the modus vivendi, the issue is not that no one has questioned this logic. Rather, within the opposition, those who have challenged it have not been electorally successful. This is evident in the case of Henri Falcón, who failed as a candidate in 2018 despite Maduro being as unpopular then as he was in 2024, according to opinion surveys. The same dynamic is visible with Henrique Capriles, who was once a highly popular opposition leader but lost significant support after adopting a more moderate stance. It is also evident in the case of Manuel Rosales, the governor of Zulia, who emerged as a plausible replacement after Machado was disqualified. Rosales had credibility as someone who had reclaimed Zulia from Chavismo and governed from the opposition without framing politics as a zero-sum struggle. Yet he was ultimately sidelined, largely because Machado’s supporters undermined him on the grounds that they reject any form of collaboration.

It is also important to recall that Machado herself was a vocal critic of Juan Guaidó, whom she regarded as too conciliatory toward Maduro. Her main criticism was that, as president of the 2015 National Assembly and interim president, he failed to invoke constitutional powers to formally call for foreign military intervention—effectively inviting external troops into the country. She criticized him forcefully for this. Looking further back, Machado was present at the swearing-in of Pedro Carmona as de facto president following the 2002 coup against Chávez. This is not mentioned simply to question her democratic credentials—though it is often raised in that context—but to underscore the narrative that underpins her political stance: the belief that Chavismo was never democratically legitimate. In her view, Venezuela was already a dictatorship in 2002, and a coup against that dictatorship was therefore justified.

Crisis, Charisma, and the Appeal of No Compromise

President Nicolas Maduro
Venezuela’s controversial President Nicolas Maduro speaks during a rally on the 22nd anniversary of the coup against Hugo Chavez in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 13, 2024. Photo: StringerAL.

This narrative resonates strongly in a country that has experienced the largest economic contraction ever recorded in peacetime, where roughly a quarter of the population has emigrated, poverty rates have exceeded 90 percent, malnutrition—virtually nonexistent in the mid-2010s—has risen to more than 25 percent, and the government has grown increasingly authoritarian. In such conditions, it is understandable that voters are drawn to a leader who argues that Maduro remains in power because previous challengers were not forceful or resolute enough. This is how Machado constructs her political persona: as the uncompromising figure, the leader unwilling to strike a deal with Chavismo, the one who promises not coexistence but defeat. Her slogan, hasta el final—“to the end”—signals a final confrontation in which victory is assured.

This narrative mobilized voters on two levels. Traditional opposition supporters embraced it enthusiastically, given their deep hostility toward Chavismo. At the same time, more centrist voters—some of whom had previously supported Chavismo—were also drawn to her. In many respects, Machado embodied characteristics associated with Chávez himself: a young, decisive, energetic leader offering a dramatic rupture. The promise she made closely resembled the promise Chávez made in 1999. This helps explain why roughly a third of the Venezuelan electorate reports supporting María Corina Machado while simultaneously viewing Chávez as a good president.

That support, however, did not entail a transformation of her underlying narrative or that of her core constituency. Instead, it reinforced a political posture fundamentally incompatible with governing alongside Chavismo. This is where the Trump administration’s intervention becomes especially revealing. The decision was to remove Maduro—to decapitate the regime—without fully dismantling it. Comprehensive regime change would have required military occupation, significant loss of US personnel, and a long-term commitment unlikely to be sustained by public opinion. As Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated, the costs of occupation often exceed those of initial military victory.

Instead, the United States adopted an approach reminiscent of earlier interventions, such as in Cuba and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War or in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua in the early twentieth century. The logic is straightforward: military leverage and conditionality remain in place, while local actors govern. It is more efficient to rule through domestic elites who follow US directives than to administer the country directly.

Why Machado Didn’t Fit the New Power Strategy

This framework also helps explain how Trump has framed his relationship with Machado. The implicit message is that she is admirable—even symbolic, as evidenced by the Nobel Peace Prize medal—but politically impractical. Incorporating her into governance would disrupt the broader strategy. After Maduro’s removal, Venezuela ceased to be primarily about Venezuela; it became a demonstration of power. The operation showcased the US capacity to remove a foreign leader with extraordinary efficiency, without the loss of American lives, and to detain him in the United States. Many observers, myself included, believe this likely involved internal collaboration, making it resemble a palace coup under the cover of military intervention. For Trump, however, the narrative is unambiguous: this is what American power looks like.

This is where Trump’s arrangement with Delcy Rodríguez acquires broader significance. The message is simple: compliance is rewarded. Speaking recently in Davos, Trump claimed—characteristically exaggerating—that Venezuela would earn more in the next six months than it had in the previous twenty years. That assertion is plainly false, given that those twenty years include the Chávez-era oil boom. But the rhetoric is less important than the underlying signal: the new Venezuelan authorities are doing what Washington demands, and they are being rewarded for it.

Trump delivered this message before an audience of European leaders, implicitly asking them which path they wished to follow—whether in relation to Venezuela, Greenland, or other geopolitical issues. Cooperation would bring benefits; resistance would invite hostility. This logic extends beyond Europe to the Middle East, including Gaza, and to Latin America more broadly. It reflects an effort to reassert US dominance in what Trump conceives as the Western Hemisphere, consistent with a revived Monroe Doctrine logic.

What emerges from this approach is an attempt to construct a functional protectorate—economically, and perhaps politically. Yet a protectorate, by definition, lacks full sovereignty. Under such conditions, the meaning of democracy becomes ambiguous. The likely outcome is an authoritarian system, potentially evolving into a form of competitive authoritarianism. Even if Venezuelan oil revenues were to increase by only a fraction of Trump’s exaggerated claims, the resulting economic growth—on the order of 20 to 25 percent annually for several years—would make such a regime politically viable.

Just as Maduro’s popularity collapsed with the economy, Delcy Rodríguez could gain substantial legitimacy if she presided over sustained economic expansion. That is the bargain Trump is offering—not out of benevolence, but because he wants Venezuela to serve as a showcase: a revitalized economy demonstrating the rewards of alignment with US hegemony. Ultimately, that is the message Trump seeks to send to democratic oppositions and authoritarian regimes alike: these are the new rules, and this is what you get when you play along.

Dr. Kamran Matin is a Reader in International Relations at the University of Sussex.

Dr. Kamran Matin: Iran Regime Has Ruled by Coercion, Not Consent

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Iran is entering a critical juncture as renewed protests expose both the fragility and the resilience of the Islamic Republic. In this in-depth interview with the ECPS, Dr. Kamran Matin argues that since the 2009 Green Movement, the Iranian regime has ruled “primarily through coercion rather than consent,” relying on repression while retaining the support of only a small social base. Yet violence alone does not explain regime survival. As Matin emphasizes, the Islamic Republic endures “not only through violence, but through a fragmented opposition” that lacks organizational depth, ideological coherence, and a credible alternative vision. Drawing on political economy, Gramscian theory, and regional geopolitics, Dr. Matin analyzes why economic shocks quickly become systemic political crises in Iran—and why, despite widespread de-legitimation, the unresolved question of “what comes next” continues to constrain revolutionary outcomes.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Iran has entered one of the most volatile phases of its post-1979 history. The protest wave that erupted after the sharp currency shock of late December 2025 quickly escalated into explicitly anti-regime mobilization, revealing not only the depth of socio-economic dislocation but also the political vulnerabilities of the Islamic Republic. In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies, Dr. Kamran Matin—Reader in International Relations at the University of Sussex—offers a theoretically informed analysis of the current conjuncture, foregrounding two interlinked claims that capture the central stakes of the moment: “Since 2009, [the] Iran regime has ruled by coercion, not consent,” and “[the] Iran regime survives not only through violence, but through a fragmented opposition.”

For Dr. Matin, the disputed 2009 election and the Green Movement mark a critical turning point in the regime’s mode of rule. As he emphasizes, “almost all of these signals are present in some form, but at least since 2009—going back to that critical moment—the Iranian state, the Islamic Republic, has ruled primarily through coercion rather than consent.” In his account, the erosion of consent is not merely ideological but institutional: the narrowing of factional pluralism and the weakening of reformist mediation diminished the regime’s capacity to manage dissent through electoral incorporation. The result, he argues, is a system that “retains the support of a small segment of Iranian society—perhaps 10 to 15 percent at most, and maybe closer to 10 percent,” while relying on “brute force: repression, torture, imprisonment, surveillance, and so on” to govern the remainder.

Yet Dr. Matin’s analysis also resists purely repression-centered explanations of authoritarian durability. Alongside state violence, he argues, regime survival is sustained by the organizational weakness and strategic incoherence of its opponents. “I would argue that, in addition to massive levels of violence, what sustains the regime is precisely the fractured nature of the opposition, its disorganization, and the absence of a political discourse that appeals equally to the main segments of society.” Even as protests broaden to include bazaar networks, students, workers, women, and peripheral provinces, the opposition—he contends—lacks the institutional capacity to translate mobilization into a viable transition project. “Apart from state violence,” he continues, “this lack of an organized alternative—ideologically, discursively, and organizationally—is a key factor keeping the regime in power.” The enduring strategic dilemma is therefore not simply the de-legitimation of the regime, but the absence of a credible successor: “Many people ask themselves, ‘What comes next?’”

Across the interview, Dr. Matin situates these dynamics within wider debates on revolutionary crises, hegemonic contestation, and regional geopolitics. He examines how economic shocks in a rentier political economy can rapidly become systemic political conflict; how coercion is deployed through targeted and exemplary violence; and how opposition plurality can both energize revolt and inhibit the formation of a unifying, “national-popular” project. Taken together, Dr. Matin’s intervention offers a stark but analytically precise assessment of Iran’s predicament: a regime increasingly dependent on coercion, confronting a society in revolt—yet facing an opposition still struggling to answer the question that shadows every revolutionary moment: what comes next?

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Dr. Kamran Matin, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

In Iran, There Is No Sharp Distinction Between the Economic and the Political

Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Ali Hamaney on billboard in Tabriz, Iran on August 11, 2019.

Dr. Kamran Matin, thank you so much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: Protests in Iran reportedly originated in a sharp currency shock on 28 December 2025 and rapidly escalated into explicitly anti-regime mobilization. Through what causal pathways do socio-economic dislocations in Iran—currency collapse, inflationary spirals, and distributive breakdown—translate into systemic political contestation rather than reformist grievance, and how does Iran’s specific configuration of state–market–religious authority condition this radicalization?

Dr. Kamran Matin: First of all, I would like to thank you for giving me this opportunity to discuss the protests in Iran. Your question is obviously very dense and contains multiple sub-questions. I will try to address them one by one, to the extent that I remember them.

In terms of economic grievances translating into political contestation, I think we have to bear in mind that Iran is still largely a rentier state. Therefore, like many rentier states—but also developmental states in general—there is hardly anything that is not political in essence. There is no sharp distinction between the economic and the political, because the economic accumulation of capitalists, or the work that the working class does for capitalists, in a country like Iran is ultimately not based—if I use the language of Marxist political economy—on surplus value in the sense we understand it in theory. Rather, profit is ultimately a redistribution of external rent by the state to various sections of society. As a result, the distribution of profit and wealth is politically determined, although not directly; it is mediated through multiple institutions and mechanisms.

In that sense, it is very easy in Iran for economic problems to become political issues. This has always been the case, even before the revolution, during the Shah period. Currently, however, this dynamic has intensified, because the combination of sanctions, the illicit economy, and the informal economy means that control over currency, in particular, is very tightly exercised. The government allocates foreign currency at different rates to different actors. There are cheaper rates from which large industrialists or merchants can benefit, but access to these requires proximity to the state or the government. So even economic competitiveness becomes a fundamentally political process. It is not economic in the straightforward sense that greater efficiency or lower production costs automatically generate higher profits. That logic has very limited purchase in a place like Iran.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the protests began in the so-called bazaar and then very quickly turned into a popular, widespread political movement. However, we should also bear in mind that the bazaar, in the context of Iran—and to some extent perhaps even in Turkey—has somewhat different meanings and characteristics. Historically, the term bazaar referred to the large mercantile bourgeoisie involved in trade. But in recent decades, and probably even earlier, the bazaar has come to include different layers. For example, the current protests were not initiated by traditional, ideologically religious merchants as such, but by shopkeepers selling electronic goods. These goods are imported, especially from Asia—South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere—and these traders were unable either to buy or to sell because the currency was in free fall. As a result, they initiated the protests. Because society as a whole was already suffering from high inflation, unemployment, and general economic insecurity, the wider population could easily identify with their grievances.

As for the second part of your question—about Iran’s specific configuration of state–market–religious authority and how it conditions this situation. The bazaar, particularly its traditional merchant class, has historically been very close to the ulama, or clerical class, through intermarriage and shared religious conservatism. At the same time, the security forces—the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and the Basij militia—have largely been recruited from the petty bourgeoisie, as well as from these social strata in different parts of Iran. There is therefore a close linkage among these elements. The government itself may be internally diverse, with competing factions, but in moments of crisis such as the current one, these factions tend to close ranks in order to weather the storm. The Supreme Leader plays a key role in maintaining a certain level of coherence within this system, though that is something we might discuss later.

Finally, there is, of course, the question of minorities, nationalities, and women—the gender dimension. In the last major wave of protests, the “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi,” or “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, women and subaltern nations were at the forefront, while large cities—especially in majority Persian-speaking regions—were comparatively quiet. This time, however, the pattern has been somewhat different. The protests began in Tehran and other major cities, while significant sections of Kurdistan remained relatively quiet, although some areas were highly active and bore the brunt of repression in the early days—places such as Ilam or Kermanshah. This difference also calls for explanation and is related to the way the previous protest wave was suppressed, as well as to the fragility and temporary nature of solidarity between the center—Persian speakers or Iranian nationalists more generally—and groups such as the Kurds, the Baluch, and the Arabs. 

I hope I have addressed your question, but I am sure that we will return to many of these issues again in subsequent questions.

Wider, More Popular, Yet Unorganized: The Limits of Expanding Protest Coalition

“Woman, life, freedom”: London protest draws thousands following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody on January 10, 2022. Photo: Vehbi Koca.

If the current protest wave incorporates bazaar and merchant networks alongside students, workers, women, and peripheral provinces, how does this re-composition of class alliances alter the movement’s structural power, organizational density, and leverage vis-à-vis the state when compared to 2009, 2017–19, and 2022? In particular, does bazaar participation reintroduce a historically decisive—but long dormant—node of revolutionary capacity?

Dr. Kamran Matin: The fact that the bazaar was involved is significant, because in the previous protests you mentioned there was always this notion that the so-called gray area of the Iranian population was not participating. By this gray area, people meant those who were unhappy or dissatisfied but not willing to go to the streets, protest, and risk their lives. This time around, that changed, because we saw participation not only in big cities but also in small ones. There were a large number of casualties in places whose names I had never even heard before—very small towns in distant provinces like Khorasan in the northeast, near Afghanistan—where historically we have seen very little in the way of radical protest against the regime. 

So, I think this time the protests were wider and more popular, with the partial exception of Kurdistan, which again has to do with the way Iranian nationalism operates. Opposition forces often fail to acknowledge Kurdish grievances as such, and not only that: by accusing Kurds of separatism and of being foreign agents, they actually—albeit indirectly—help the Iranian state repress them even more brutally. As a result, people were very afraid of much harsher repression in Kurdish areas, and some parts remained quiet, although, there were many protests in other regions.

Another important point is the significance of the Green Movement in 2009. Just to clarify, in case readers do not remember, it was triggered by a disputed election in which Ahmadinejad was declared the winner, even though Mousavi, the other candidate, contested the result, leading to large protests. That episode effectively resulted in the strategic marginalization of the so-called reformist faction within the Islamic Republic from the state apparatus and state power. This had incredibly important consequences for subsequent protests, because before 2009 the Islamic Republic was often able to remain flexible vis-à-vis popular mobilization. The reformist faction could articulate some of the grievances, allowing people to continue expressing their dissatisfaction through the electoral system by voting for reformist candidates. In this way, the Islamic Republic was able to absorb a great deal of social and political energy and was therefore not as fragile or brittle politically as it later became.

With the sidelining of the reformists, the state became more or less monolithic, dominated by what Western commentators often describe as hardliners or conservatives. Reformists did not disappear entirely, but they no longer wielded any significant power. At the same time, people lost faith in the reformist route to change. From that point onward, every new protest became more radical. Electoral participation dropped dramatically, even according to the state’s own statistics, which are themselves highly engineered and manipulated. Around 2017 or 2018, a famous slogan emerged: “Neither reformists nor conservatives—this is the end of the story.” In effect, people were saying that they no longer trusted either faction, which meant that they were now seeking radical change in the state itself. In their view, the Islamic Republic had to go.

In the most recent protests, we can also see that there was no reference to any possible alternatives within the establishment or the regime, and the slogans were overtly radical. Many of these slogans had appeared in previous protest waves as well, but from the limited footage I have seen, the key difference was the level of determination shown by protesters in confronting the security forces. They fought them in the streets and, in some cases, even chased them away. This is why, on the 8th or 9th of January, the regime deployed the IRGC. There are also many reports suggesting that the regime brought in militias from Iraq—the Shi‘a militias of the PMU, or Hashd al-Shaabi—as well as other foreign elements of the so-called axis of resistance that it could mobilize. The idea was that, because they were foreigners, they would have no relatives or social ties that might restrain their actions.

So, the density was there, and the scale was there, but organization was not necessarily present—and that is something we may want to discuss further.

Why Repression, Not Legitimacy, Remains the Regime’s Decisive Pillar

Free Iran Protest in Toronto, Ontario: A large group of demonstrators marches south along Bay Street. Photo: Cameron Ballantyne Smith.

In assessing whether the Mullah regime is approaching a decisive rupture, which indicators matter most analytically: elite fissures within the clerical–security nexus, defections or hesitation within coercive institutions, breakdowns in fiscal extraction and strike coordination, or erosion of regime legitimacy within religious networks? How should these signals be weighted relative to one another?

Dr. Kamran Matin: Almost all of these signals are present in some form, but at least since 2009—going back to that critical moment—the Iranian state, the Islamic Republic, has ruled primarily through coercion rather than consent. It still retains the support of a small segment of Iranian society—perhaps 10 to 15 percent at most, and maybe closer to 10 percent. For the rest, it relies on brute force: repression, torture, imprisonment, surveillance, and so on.

If I use Gramscian language, there were periods when a form of hegemonic governance existed, combining coercion with consent. Consent was generated through elections—however engineered they may have been—but also through internal plurality and factional diversity. Reformists and hardliners coexisted, and people could choose one over the other. At the time, many Iranians used to say that they were choosing the “bad” over the “worse.” That option, however, was removed after 2009. From then on, there was effectively only the “very bad” to vote for.

All the other indicators you mention are also present: dire economic conditions, a deep crisis of regime legitimacy, a lack of future prospects, international isolation, and geopolitical weakening—especially since October 7 and developments affecting the so-called proxy forces in the region, the fall of Assad, and related events. Without sheer violence, the Islamic Republic would not be standing. We can see this clearly in the current round of protests as well. Millions of people took to the streets across Iran, in both small towns and large cities, and yet within two nights the regime killed so many people that it managed to force the population back into their homes.

I would say—and this is not just my view, but one shared by scholars of revolution—that it is not enough for a population simply to reject the way it is ruled for a revolution to succeed. For a revolution to succeed, the state must also be unable to repress in the way it has. As long as the repressive and security organs of the state are both willing and capable of suppressing protests, the regime is likely to survive. This is precisely what we have seen over at least the past ten years. So, I think this is the most important indicator.

An indirect confirmation of this can be seen in the way the 12-day war last summer paved the way for the current protests. Militarily, people saw that the Islamic Republic was unable to defend itself. A large number of the most senior commanders of the IRGC were killed on the first day, and the so-called axis of resistance forces disappeared from the political scene, at least temporarily. This created the impression that the state was far more fragile than before, which encouraged people—or gave them the courage—to act as they did this time.

On top of that, there was a statement by Trump, which initially emboldened the protesters. But we know what happened afterward: he changed his position, and the threat of intervention, at least for now, disappeared. This again demonstrates how vital the physical, coercive power of the state remains for keeping it intact and for sustaining the current elite in power. The moment it changes, the Islamic Republic will fall.

So, everything now really depends on whether the coherence of the security apparatus and the repressive organs of the state can be maintained in the period ahead.

Many Symbols, No Common Project

Building on your work on societal multiplicity and the nation’s Janus-like form, how should we interpret the coexistence of competing symbolic projects in the streets—monarchist iconography, republican imaginaries, feminist slogans, and multi-ethnic frames? Under conditions of uneven and combined development, does this plurality enable a Gramscian “national-popular” articulation, or does it risk fragmenting sovereignty claims in ways that invite external instrumentalization?

Dr. Kamran Matin: I cannot remember the exact words, but Lenin has this famous line that says revolution brings together the most extreme, diverse, and different forces into some sort of unplanned alliance against the status quo. So, it is not surprising that we see very different forces—ideologically, politically, and socially—on the streets. Like most revolutions, these protests in Iran are defined more by opposition to what exists than by a shared vision of the alternative that each actor seeks to establish.

Historically, it is in such contexts that an organized political party or movement can harness this massive social energy toward a particular political objective. This role was played in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini, a charismatic leader who was able, in some ways, to direct the revolutionary movement. He was vague enough to appeal to all sections of society, while at the same time being very clear in his opposition to the monarchy. This was central to how he built a hegemonic force, as he managed to present the particular interests of Islamists as the general interest of society as a whole. This, of course, ended once the revolution succeeded, when we saw how even Khomeini had to rely on massive violence to consolidate the post-revolutionary state.

At present, we have a great diversity of social and political forces and classes, but the opposition lacks two crucial things. First, it lacks organization on the ground—again, with the partial exception of Kurdistan, where Kurdish parties have a long history of organized politics. I am sure there are clandestine networks in Kurdish cities and elsewhere, but nothing comparable exists in the rest of Iran, for a variety of reasons. One key reason is that since the 1980s the Islamic Republic has invested almost everything in the physical destruction of the left: mass executions, imprisonment, forced exile, and, even in exile, hundreds of assassinations of dissidents and political leaders. Anyone who could potentially have played a leading role was eliminated.

As a result, we lack organization, we lack charismatic figures, and neither the left nor the liberals possess organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense. A national-popular front or bloc, in Gramsci’s formulation, also requires organic intellectuals who can articulate a hegemonic project capable of uniting otherwise disparate sectors of the opposition. We do not have this, and in some respects we see the opposite dynamic at work.

Among monarchist forces gathered around the son of the former king, Reza Pahlavi, there is a strong unwillingness to engage in collaboration on an equal footing with other opposition forces. They seek dominance rather than partnership and claim a form of quasi-divine legitimacy. It is almost treated as the birthright of Reza Pahlavi to become the next monarch of Iran, or at least to lead a transitional period. As a result, meaningful cooperation with other parties or opposition groups becomes impossible. The so-called Georgetown alliance during the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement collapsed very quickly precisely for this reason, as he withdrew rather than accept equality with others.

Another major source of fragmentation within the opposition is the deployment of an exclusionary Iranian nationalism—by monarchists, by liberals in the opposition, and by the Islamic Republic itself. After the 12-day war, there was a sudden surge in nationalist symbolism: the promotion of Cyrus the Great, the erection of his statue in Tehran, and the revival of symbols of ancient Iran by the regime. The Islamic Republic understood that Islamist discourse could no longer mobilize society, but that nationalist appeals still might. At the same time, this further alienated the non-Persian peripheries of Iran, which in fact constitute more than half of the population: Azeri Turks, who make up roughly 20 to 25 percent; Kurds, around 10 to 15 percent; as well as Arabs, Baluch, Turkmens, Gilaks, and others.

Most of these groups are unwilling to contribute to the rise to power of forces that already seek to subordinate them politically and culturally. This denial of Iran’s internal diversity by large sections of the opposition creates a major barrier to forming a genuinely powerful nationwide opposition bloc. Each opposition group on its own is too small or too weak to overthrow the regime, yet the discourses they deploy and the strategies they pursue also prevent them from agreeing even on a minimal common program to confront the Islamic Republic.

I would argue that, in addition to massive levels of violence, what sustains the regime is precisely the fractured nature of the opposition, its disorganization, and the absence of a political discourse that appeals equally to the main segments of society. The Women, Life, Freedom slogan did manage to do this briefly. However, as I noted earlier, it was quickly undermined both by internal divisions within the opposition and by the regime itself. Within weeks, an alternative slogan emerged—“Man, Motherland, Development”—which is strikingly reminiscent of fascist slogans from Mussolini’s Italy. Woman, Life, Freedom versus Man, Motherland, Development. Until recently, Reza Pahlavi even displayed this slogan on his profile on X. I think the brief hegemonic role played by the Women, Life, Freedom slogan was significant, but it was actively undermined by substantial sections of the Iranian opposition. 

Necro-politics in Practice: How the Regime Governs Through Maiming, Fear, and Exemplary Violence

Pro-government demonstrators march in support of the regime after the weekly Friday Prayers on January 05, 2018 in Tehran.

Reports describe systematic maiming, mass casualties, and targeted injuries amid an intensifying crackdown under communication blackouts. How should we conceptualize this repertoire of violence—deterrence, exemplary punishment, strategic mutilation, or biopolitical terror—and what does comparative evidence suggest about its medium-term political effects on mobilization, radicalization, and regime cohesion?

Dr. Kamran Matin: The Islamic Republic has a very complex necro-politics. Even the treatment of the dead has a particular political economy. In addition to what you mentioned in the question, many people have been shot in the eyes. This is very deliberate, because the aim is for those who are injured to remain alive and visible, walking around in public, so that others see this as the fate of anyone who opposes the regime.

This is particularly striking because, in the past, the Islamic Republic sought to conceal its violence. Even now, it is only in recent years that there has been some acknowledgement that in 1988 around 3,000 to 5,000 political prisoners were executed. At the time, almost nobody knew; most Iranians were unaware because it was carried out entirely in secrecy. By contrast, today state media actually show the protests and even display bodies in morgues and other locations.

What is also remarkable is that when families of those who have been killed go to collect the bodies of their loved ones, they are required to pay for the bullets that were fired at them. For each bullet, they are reportedly asked to pay around seven million Iranian tomans, which at the current exchange rate is roughly $80 or so—I cannot recall the exact figure. In other words, families are literally required to pay for the bullet that killed their loved one in order to retrieve the body.

On top of that, there are reports that families are offered the option of signing a document stating that the person who was killed was a member of the Basij, the pro-government militia—thus turning them, quote-unquote, into a “martyr.” This allows the government to claim that large numbers of security forces were killed by terrorists allegedly backed by Israel, the US, and others. If families refuse, the bodies may be buried in unmarked graves, and the family may never know where their loved one is buried. In some cases, families are confronted with this choice in addition to the financial demand.

I should add, however, that demanding money for bullets or for the return of bodies is not new. This practice was widespread in the 1980s, especially in Kurdistan, but also in cases involving political prisoners who were executed or hanged in prisons. The Islamic Republic therefore deploys violence in a highly complex and sophisticated manner. It uses exemplary punishment to deter others from protesting and to instill fear across society. When people see injured individuals everywhere, or witness bodies being withheld, mishandled, buried anonymously, or simply disappearing, the psychological impact is deeply traumatizing.

In the short term, this strategy may work for the regime by frightening people into submission. In the longer term, however, it produces enormous anger and even hatred within society—among individuals, families, and communities. This accumulated resentment is likely to erupt again in future protest waves. Yet the Islamic Republic is almost built on periodic crises; in a sense, it thrives on them. Just before we began, I saw a pro-regime journalist or activist claiming that, thanks to God, these recent events have extended the life of the Islamic Republic by fifty years.

They feel that they have not only repressed the protests, but that the very fact of having done so successfully has given them a sense—not of legitimacy, but of unassailability. This, in turn, makes people think twice before participating in the next round of protests.

Why Iran’s Opposition Is Unprepared for Transition

During revolutionary moments, the question of political succession becomes decisive. How would you characterize the current opposition landscape in terms of organizational depth, ideological coherence, and governing capacity, and what risks emerge when maximalist anti-regime unity is not matched by institutional preparedness for transition?

Dr. Kamran Matin: The opposition has none of these: neither organizational depth, nor a clear plan, nor the human capacity to run post-regime governance in any meaningful way at the moment. The material elements are there, but they are not organized in any coherent way. Again, I would distinguish between the situation in Kurdistan and the rest of Iran, because there are important differences.

I could talk for hours about this, but briefly, there are organized Kurdish parties with bases very close to the border, and there is an organic connection with society. As we remember from 1979, the moment the Shah fell, the Kurdish regions became autonomous and self-governing because this organizational infrastructure was already in place. We see similar patterns in Rojava after 2011, or in Iraq after the 1991 Kuwait War. But in the rest of Iran, we do not have this, and I think this absence is absolutely crucial.

Apart from state violence, this lack of an organized alternative—ideologically, discursively, and organizationally—is a key factor keeping the regime in power. Many people ask themselves, “What comes next?” And this is precisely why many were reluctant to take to the streets in the past. One reason Reza Pahlavi’s name was chanted in some protests is that people believed he had a workable plan, although we later saw that he really did not. He called on people to go to the streets and suggested that help was on the way, echoing Trump’s rhetoric, and obviously nothing materialized. In fact, many people now blame him for a significant portion of the casualties in Iran. So, overall, the opposition is rather weak.

Trump’s Iran Rhetoric Aims at Behavioral Change, Not Regime Change

US Presidential candidate Donald Trump held a campaign rally at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 4, 2024. Photo: Chip Somodevilla.

US President Trump’s call for Iranians to “keep protesting” and his claim that “help is on its way” mark an unusually explicit rhetorical intervention. How do such statements reshape internal protest dynamics, regime threat perceptions, and escalation logics—and where do they sit on the spectrum between moral encouragement, strategic signaling, and coercive diplomacy?

Dr. Kamran Matin: I think for Trump all three are objectives—strategic signaling, coercive diplomacy, and moral encouragement. But ultimately, he is pursuing his own interests. And his primary interest is not regime change, but a change in the regime’s behavior. That is crucial, because it means that Trump may seek to instrumentalize the protests in order to extract a deal from the regime.

The problem is that Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, cannot make such a deal, because it would be perceived as a form of submission. Any agreement—at least one based on US conditions—would be seen as a defeat of the regime. And those conditions are unacceptable: no nuclear enrichment, no long-range missiles, and no proxy forces. These are core pillars of the Islamic Republic, so they simply cannot concede them. This means that even though US preference is for behavioral change rather than regime change as such—and this is clearly articulated in the US National Security Strategy released a few weeks ago, as well as reflected in recent US interventions, such as in Venezuela—this strategy has inherent limits.

Trump was hoping that internal pressure within Iran, combined with the threat of intervention, could be leveraged to secure a deal that would advance US objectives in the Middle East, open Iranian markets, and distance Iran from China, among other goals. This has not happened. And the United States does not appear to have a clear plan for what to do if a deal proves impossible. This is where US and Israeli positions diverge to some extent. For Israel, any attack would need to lead to a radical outcome; otherwise, it would incur the costs of Iranian retaliation without achieving a clear political objective. This helps explain the confusion over recent developments, including why Trump has not followed through on what he initially appeared to signal.

That said, revolutions have historically been aided—often indirectly and unintentionally—by foreign powers. The October Revolution succeeded in part because of World War I and the weakening of the Tsarist regime. The French Revolution was linked to a severe fiscal crisis driven by geopolitical rivalry with England. More broadly, many classical revolutions have occurred in the context of war and wider geopolitical crises. In this respect, Iran is not exceptional.

The key issue, however, is whether there is sufficient organization on the ground to take advantage of these geopolitical and inter-imperialist rivalries. Unfortunately, to a large extent, there is not.

Why Rojava’s Future Lies Beyond Counterterrorism

Turning to Syria, with Kurdish-held areas under renewed assault and the future of Rojava/AANES increasingly uncertain, what are the plausible political trajectories—forced integration, negotiated autonomy, territorial rollback, or renewed international guarantees—and which are structurally most likely given current regional alignments?

Dr. Kamran Matin: The current so-called transitional government is clearly no different in terms of what it wants to do with the Kurdish parts of the region in Syria, or with other minorities. We have seen what it has done to the Druze and the Alawites. The fact that it is not doing more, or has not been able to do so, is because there has been resistance against it. So, I would say the long-term aim of this government is to control the entirety of Rojava, while making some sort of symbolic concessions—such as the decree announced yesterday (January 16, 2026)  recognizing the Kurdish language to some extent—but without any constitutional guarantee of self-governance of the kind the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) demands.

From what happened in Aleppo in recent weeks, we know that this followed very quickly after a meeting in Paris between Israel, the Syrian transitional government, and the United States; I believe Turkey was present as well. It seems there has been an agreement that areas under SDF or Rojava control should be limited to east of the Euphrates. At the moment, the SDF is being evacuated from other regions. Leaders of the Autonomous Administration might think this will become the natural border between their autonomous region and the rest of Syria, and that may be the case in the short term, but I am confident that pressure will continue and that the government will push for more.

The Syrian government is prepared to make every concession possible to Israel in order to prevent intervention and then, with the help of Turkey, to deal with the Autonomous Administration in a gradual manner. Initially, it was thought that the so-called resolution process in Turkey—including PKK disarmament and dissolution—was the price the Kurdish movement was paying to keep Rojava safe. But I think this assessment has changed. At first, the Turkish state was clearly worried about Israel attempting to recruit allies in the region, as well as about Iran and the possibility of Iran fragmenting. Over time, however, Turkey regained its momentum. Now it is using the so-called resolution process precisely to keep the PKK, or whatever it is now called, out of the Rojava scene, and in fact to use the absence of conflict with the PKK in order to concentrate its efforts on Rojava.

I have written about this in recent weeks and days, and I do not know how much the Rojava leadership reads or listens to external advice, but I think they should be very concerned. This process is not going to end. Pressure will advance step by step, and attempts will be made to retake territory incrementally. The Autonomous Administration must ensure that its relationship with the United States is not based solely on counterterrorism and ISIS. It needs to push for some form of political recognition and for a decentralized or federal system. Otherwise, renewed conflict between the two sides is inevitable.

Regional Powers Prefer a Weakened Iran to a Collapsing One

Iran-Map

How do regional power calculations—the Erdogan regime’s anti-Kurdish security doctrine, Damascus’s centralization drive, Russia’s brokerage role, and US/Gulf/Israeli threat perceptions—intersect with Iran’s internal crisis, and what implications does each Iranian outcome (hardening, fragmentation, or transition) carry for the fate of Rojava?

Dr. Kamran Matin: This is a very complex question. In terms of existing states—not just Turkey, but also the transitional government in Syria—they are ultimately driven by a vision of a centralized, unified, and homogeneous state. In societies characterized by a multiplicity of peoples, this model clearly does not work except through violence. And violence begets violence, which is precisely what we have witnessed over the past hundred years.

In that sense, any event or process that leads to de facto decentralization of power in these states—for example, what happened in Iraq in 2003—is viewed as a major threat. Turkey still regrets having allowed the KRG to emerge in the first place, and it now harbors similar concerns regarding Iran. As a result, Turkey—which is ostensibly a regional competitor of Iran—is now openly assisting the Islamic Republic. It opposes US intervention and provides intelligence against Kurdish armed forces, because it believes that the moment the Iranian state weakens, another Kurdish entity could emerge. Such a development would have direct implications for the Kurdish question within Turkey itself.

In this sense, the Kurdish question is a challenge for all these states, but at the same time it also constitutes the basis for their tactical cooperation—and even strategic alignment—at critical moments. If Iran were to weaken significantly, or if a situation similar to Syria in 2011–12 were to unfold there, this would pose a serious challenge for Turkey. At the same time, it is important to note that Iran has a large Azeri Turkish population. Some observers are concerned that Turkey might seek to instrumentalize this segment of Iranian society through Turkish nationalist sentiments in order to establish a foothold in northwestern Iran. There is also the question of Azerbaijan and whether the two might coordinate in such a scenario.

That said, from the perspective of regional states, the overall calculus appears to be that a weakened Islamic Republic is preferable to one that collapses entirely. This helps explain why Arab states, too, have urged the United States not to attack Iran. A breakdown of central authority and a deeply unstable Iran are outcomes that alarm everyone. At the same time, while many regional actors are hostile to the Islamic Republic, they also do not want to see an unmanaged, uncontrolled, and unplanned collapse of the Iranian state. As a result, they are actively seeking to prevent such an outcome.

Protest against ICE following the killing of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman fatally shot by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent during a federal operation, in Foley Square, Manhattan, NYC, USA on January 8, 2026. The fatal encounter has sparked national outrage and protests demanding accountability and reform of ICE use-of-force policies. Photo: Dreamstime.

Law, Order and the Lives in Between

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceHomeHuman RightsMigrationVoice of Youth

In this Voice of Youth (VoY) article, Emmanouela Papapavlou delivers a powerful reflection on state violence, immigration enforcement, and the fragile boundaries of democratic accountability. The article critically examines the fatal shooting of a civilian woman by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. Moving beyond official narratives of “self-defense,” Papapavlou situates the incident within broader patterns of institutional violence, racialized enforcement, and the erosion of human rights under the banner of security. By drawing historical parallels to the killing of George Floyd and interrogating the politics of “law and order,” the piece challenges readers to reconsider whose lives are protected—and whose are rendered expendable—in contemporary democracies.

By Emmanouela Papapavlou*

In a world where the concept of “security” weighs increasingly heavily on public policy, the use of state violence remains one of the most contentious and polarizing issues. In recent days, news that an agent of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed a 37 year-old woman in Minneapolis has reignited the debate over the limits of state power, institutional impunity, and human rights in one of the world’s most developed democracies.

The incident took place on January 7, 2026, during a large-scale operation aimed at enforcing immigration law in the city. Official statements from government authorities described the shooting as an act of self-defense, claiming that the woman attempted to “strike officers” with her vehicle. At the same time, however, video footage and eyewitness accounts contradict this version of events, suggesting that the gunshot was fired as the driver was attempting to leave the scene, without an evident and immediate threat to the officers’ lives.

The government’s effort to justify the action, even employing language such as “domestic terrorism operation,” has sparked outrage and skepticism among local officials, human rights organizations, and ordinary citizens. The mayor of Minneapolis openly stated that the self-defense arguments were “false” and called for ICE to withdraw from the city altogether. Many have described the killing as a clear example of excessive use of force by state authorities, particularly within the context of a large enforcement mission that disproportionately targets vulnerable communities.

But can this case truly be treated as an isolated incident? Or does it represent yet another link in a growing chain of violent encounters that follow a disturbingly familiar pattern? The Minneapolis killing is already being described as at least the fifth fatal outcome of similar federal operations over the past two years, suggesting that law enforcement strategy has evolved into an aggressive and dangerous form of violence, often exercised without meaningful accountability or transparency.

Social scientists and activists point out that the use of force by state authorities, whether in immigration enforcement or neighborhood policing, frequently activates deeper structures of social inequality. When the rhetoric of “law and order” is prioritized over human safety, trust between state institutions and the communities they serve erodes rapidly. And this raises a fundamental question: is the principle of “legality” applied equally to everyone, or is it selectively deployed as a tool of control and discipline over specific social groups?

This case cannot be examined outside its broader historical context. In 2020, in the same city of Minneapolis, George Floyd was killed as a police officer pressed a knee into his neck, turning a routine arrest into a public execution witnessed by the world. That moment became a global symbol of systemic police violence and racial injustice, igniting mass protests and exposing how deeply embedded power, race, and state violence are within modern societies.

And yet, how much has truly changed since then? Even today, the way state violence is addressed, whether through policing or immigration enforcement, continues to be shaped by the same logic that transforms people into threats and human lives into acceptable risks. The stories of those killed become symbols not only of injustice, but of a persistent institutional indifference toward the protection of life and dignity.

The Minneapolis case therefore serves as a reminder that violence exercised by institutions is not merely a “tragic mistake” or an “unfortunate exception.” It is part of a broader relationship between power and vulnerability that tests the very foundations of democracy and human rights. And just as in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, a new generation is once again refusing to accept narratives that normalize violence in the name of security. A generation that insists on asking the same uncomfortable question: what does security really mean, when preserving it requires the loss of human life?

 

(*) Emmanouela Papapavlou is a high school student from Thessaloniki, Greece, deeply passionate about social and political issues. She has actively participated in Model United Nations and other youth forums, serving as a chairperson in multiple conferences and winning awards in Greek debate competitions. Writing is her greatest passion, and she loves using it to explore democracy, civic engagement, and human rights. Her dream is to share her ideas, inspire action, and amplify the voices of young people who want to make a difference. Email: emmanpapapavlou@gmail.com

Photo: Julia Sudnitskaya.

Dopamine Detox, Self-Discipline, and the Populist Moralization of Responsibility

by CommentariesDigital-populismEditor’s ChoiceHome

This commentary interrogates the rising popularity of “dopamine detox” as a moralized response to digital overload and burnout, situating it within contemporary populist logics. Rather than challenging the political economy of platform capitalism, the discourse reframes structural problems of attention extraction, inequality, and exhaustion as failures of individual self-discipline. Drawing on political economy and cultural sociology, the piece argues that dopamine detox resonates with a depoliticized form of populism that governs through moral binaries—disciplined versus undisciplined—rather than through explicit elite–people antagonism. By transforming self-control into a civic and economic virtue, the trend normalizes inequality and obscures corporate and regulatory responsibility. Ultimately, the commentary shows how neoliberal self-help cultures intersect with populist moralization to shift blame downward while leaving platform power largely unchallenged.

By Zeynep Temel*

The term “dopamine detox” has emerged as a popular self-regulation trend across digital platforms, wellness cultures, and productivity discourses in the past few years. It is being promoted as a remedy for distraction, burnout, and declining focus; through practices such as abstaining from social media, minimizing pleasurable stimuli, reducing digital consumption such as screen time, and deliberately embracing “boring” routines. The concept promises mental clarity and renewed productivity through individual restraint on various different platform ranging from TikTok videos to self-help books and corporate wellness advice.

However, this trend goes beyond dopamine detox’s popular neuroscientific framing, as it effectively reflects a broader political and moral shift. This shift is visible in how attention, self-control, and responsibility are actively governed under contemporary capitalism. This commentary therefore argues that dopamine detox should be understood not merely as a lifestyle trend or productivity technique, but as a neoliberal moral project that resonates with contemporary populist narratives. The reason behind this is that dopamine detox, instead of challenging the structural conditions that produce distraction and exhaustion, places the responsibility onto individuals. This relocation transforms self-discipline into moral virtue while also depoliticizing systemic inequalities embedded in the digital attention economy.

From Neuroscience to Moral Narrative

The scientific language surrounding dopamine detox is often misleading. In essence, the neuroscientific definition of dopamine is more complex than it simply being a “pleasure chemical.” It is a neurotransmitter that is involved in motivation, learning, and reward prediction. In fact, work by Berridge & Robinson (1998) demonstrates that dopamine is more closely associated with “wanting” and incentive salience than with pleasure itself. Clinical interventions related to dopamine regulation are also typically reserved for neurological or psychiatric conditions, bearing little resemblance to the lifestyle practices promoted online as “dopamine detox.”

Several scholars and clinicians further emphasize that dopamine detox lacks empirical grounding as a medical or neuroscientific intervention. Psychiatrist Anna Lembke notes that while excessive stimulation can indeed shape habits and compulsive behaviors, the idea of “resetting” dopamine through short-term abstinence is mainly metaphorical than clinical (Lembke, 2021). 

However, the concept has gained remarkable cultural traction, and for a reason. As Eva Illouz (2007) argues, therapeutic language often migrates into everyday life not for being scientifically precise, but because it provides moral narratives of self-improvement and personal responsibility. In the case of “dopamine detox” therapeutic language functions to frame distraction as personal weakness, and to frame restraint as a signal of maturity, rationality, and self-mastery.

The Attention Economy and Individualized Responsibility

Political economy of digital platforms is also a crucial component of the rise of dopamine detox. Systemic extraction and monetization of attention are building blocks of contemporary platform capitalism. Similarly, social media platforms rely on algorithmic personalization, feedback loops, and continuous stimulation to maximize engagement and advertising revenue (Zuboff & Schwandt, 2019).

The way in which social media infrastructures shape user behavior is demonstrated in various empirical research. One of them is Zulli & Zulli’s (2020) work saying TikTok fosters “imitation publics” by encouraging users to replicate trends, sounds, and formats through algorithmic visibility incentives. Another one is Schellewald’s ethnographic research demonstrating how TikTok’s “For You” page structures everyday interaction by curating content flows that blur the boundary between personal expression platform-driven circulation (Schellewald, 2024). 

While these structural dynamics exist, dopamine detox discourse rarely questions platform design, corporate incentives or regulatory responsibility, and instead reframes overstimulation as a problem of individual excess (too much scrolling, too much pleasure, too little discipline). This shift echoes Michel Foucault’s description of neoliberal governmentality, in which individuals are encouraged to govern themselves according to market rationalities rather than asking for collective or institutional intervention (Foucault et al., 2010). The result is a paradoxical form of resistance that leaves the underlying economic model of attention extraction intact.

Moralized Productivity and Populist Resonance

Dopamine detox resonates with contemporary forms of populism not through electoral rhetoric or charismatic leadership, but through moralization. Because cultural and neoliberal variants of populism often operate by translating structural and economic problems into questions of individual virtue and responsibility, dopamine detox mirrors populist logics that divide subjects into “disciplined” and “undisciplined,” or the self-controlled and the irresponsible. In this sense, dopamine detox does not mobilize populism through the language of “the people” versus “the elite,” but through a moral distinction between the disciplined and the undisciplined. This type of populism governs through self-blame; thus dopamine detox discourse exemplifies a depoliticized, affective form of populist reasoning. 

This framework transforms self-control into an economic and moral virtue, and productivity into a character trait instead of output. As observed by Jonathan Crary, even rest and withdrawal are increasingly instrumentalized as strategies to enhance future productivity rather than as forms of genuine refusal (Crary, 2014). 

Dopamine detox fits neatly into this moral economy. High-dopamine activities such as social media usage, gaming, and entertainment are viewed as threats to cognitive capital and economic self-worth. By contrast, abstention is celebrated as common sense and self-discipline. This logic mirrors Weberian asceticism in a digital age-updated way, where self-denial signals moral legitimacy and economic rationality (Weber, 1930). 

Crucially, this moralization obscures inequality as the capacity to disengage from platforms, curate “low dopamine” lifestyles or embrace minimalist routines assumes material security. For precarious workers, freelancers, and gig-economy participants, constant connectivity is more of a condition of survival than that of choice. 

Affective Governance and the Politics of “Calm”

“Affective governance,” a term coined by Sara Ahmed (2024) signifying the circulation of emotions that attach moral value to certain ways of being is an important component of dopamine detox narrative. This affective hierarchy favors calm, controlled subjects whose lives fit white-collar work and middle-class wellness norms. 

Crucially, this hierarchy is not sustained only through discourse, but also through aesthetics. It is reproduced through carefully curated visual and lifestyle cues involving neutral color palettes, quiet mornings, and minimalist routines, thereby connecting dopamine detox to broader cultural trends such as “clean girl” aesthetics, soft productivity, and wellness minimalism. 

Depoliticization Through Self-Blame

What makes dopamine detox particularly significant is its depoliticizing effect. It normalizes exhaustion as a personal management issue rather than a political one by turning structural problems of attention extraction into individualized moral responsibility. This shift mirrors broader neoliberal-populist dynamics in which systemic failures ranging from labor precarity to digital surveillance are reframed as matters of individual choice and discipline.

In this regard, dopamine detox illustrates a subtle but powerful form of contemporary populist reasoning: one that governs through affect, morality, and self-blame; rather than focusing on regulating platforms, addressing corporate power or rethinking digital labor. 

Conclusion: Detox Without Transformation?

This commentary argues that dopamine detox should be understood not as a scientifically grounded intervention, but as a neoliberal and moralized response to platform-induced overstimulation. It claims to resist distraction and burnout by framing them as failures of individual discipline which ends up in reinforcing the very economic logics causing them.

The political question then, is not about whether individuals need to reduce screen time, but why attention economies remain largely unregulated while self-discipline is constantly promoted as the solution. Another question that arises is if dopamine detox risks becoming yet another form of self-blame -rather than transformation- in an economy designed to exhaust, unless the political economy of platforms is addressed.

 

(*) Zeynep Temel is a PhD candidate in International Political Economy at Marmara University, Istanbul, but currently based in Shanghai. Her research interests span inequality, platform capitalism, popular culture, and gender, with a regional focus on East Asia. She works on how economic and political structures shape everyday practices, identities, and moral expectations, particularly through attention, consumption, and labor under contemporary capitalism.

 

References

Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press.

Berridge, K. C. & Robinson, T. E. (1998). “What is the role of dopamine in reward? Hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience?” Brain Research Reviews, 28(3), 309–369.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0173(98)00019-8

Crary, J. (2014). 24/7: Late capitalism and the ends of sleep. Verso.

Foucault, M.; Senellart, M.; Ewald, F.; Fontana, A.; Davidson, A.I. & Burchell, G.D. (2010). The birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79.

Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Polity Press.

Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine nation: Finding balance in the age of indulgence. Unabridged. Penguin Audio.

Müller, J. (2016). What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812293784

Schellewald, A. (2024). “Discussing the role of TikTok sharing practices in everyday social life.” International Journal of Communication, 18, 909–926.

Weber, M. (1930). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Scribner/Simon & Schuster.

Zuboff, S. & Schwandt, K. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

Zulli, D. & Zulli, D. J. (2020). “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the TikTok platform.” New Media & Society, 24(8), 1872-1890. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603 (Original work published 2022)

Voters queue at a polling station in Sendra village near Beawar during the Panchayati Raj elections in India on September 28, 2020, held amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with turnout exceeding 83 percent in the first phase across 25 districts. Photo: Dreamstime.

Voting with Freebies: How Direct Welfare Benefits Reshape Electoral Behaviour in India

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceGenderHomeVoice of Youth

In this analytically rich commentary, ECPS Youth Group member Saurabh Raj examines how direct welfare delivery is transforming electoral politics in India. Focusing on the recent Bihar assembly election, Raj shows how visible and targeted benefits—especially cash transfers to women—have become a powerful political language shaping voter participation and choice. Conceptualising this shift as “freebie populism,” the article argues that welfare now operates not only as a developmental tool but as a mode of political mobilisation, mediated through digital infrastructures and personalised state–citizen encounters. While caste, religion, and ideology remain influential, Raj highlights the growing importance of the individual beneficiary as a new axis of political belonging. Situating Bihar within broader interstate patterns, the article raises critical questions about democratic accountability, political reasoning, and the future trajectory of Indian democracy.

By Saurabh Raj*

The recent Bihar state[1] assembly election provides a useful lens to examine how welfare-centred mobilisation is reshaping contemporary electoral politics in India. Bihar recorded its highest ever voter turnout at 66.9 percent. The gender pattern was even more striking. Women voted at 71.6 percent while men voted at 62.8 percent. In 130 of the 243 constituencies, more women than men participated. These are not small variations or one time anomalies. They represent a structural shift in who participates and who determines electoral outcomes (Basu 2021).

The pattern of results closely mirrors this shift. The incumbent governing coalition won 114 of the 130 seats where women led the turnout which is close to 88 percent of all such constituencies. This alignment coincided with the scale and timing of welfare measures that reached women directly, warranting closer analytical attention. A direct cash transfer equivalent to approximately USD 120 to over twelve million women shortly before the election was only one part of a wider package that included pension increases, electricity bill relief and higher payments for frontline workers. The opposition responded with guarantee booklets, registration drives and promises of future support, as well as cards distributed by Jan Suraj[2] that signalled an alternative welfare imagination. Welfare was not an accessory to the campaign. It was the central axis around which political mobilisation occurred.

This election therefore makes visible a broader phenomenon that has been unfolding across India. Welfare centred electoral strategies are transforming political communication, voter reasoning and the emotional structure of democratic belonging. The rise of freebie populism, a term used here to describe the combination of populist rhetoric with highly visible and personalised welfare delivery, marks a distinct shift in how the state is imagined and how voters evaluate political actors. The term “freebie populism” is used here as an analytic category rather than a normative judgement. It refers not to the undesirability of welfare provision but to a specific political logic in which competitive electoral incentives privilege immediacy, visibility, and personalisation of benefits. This logic differs from rights-based or institutionalised welfare regimes, where entitlements are routinised and less directly tied to electoral cycles. The distinction is important, as the argument advanced here concerns the mode of political mobilisation rather than the legitimacy of welfare itself. ​​

Methods Note

This commentary draws on publicly available data from the Election Commission of India (Election Commission of India, 2024), state budget documents, press releases, field reporting in Hindi and English media and academic literature on populism, welfare delivery and voting behaviour. Interpretive arguments build on comparative work on populism (Mudde, 2004; Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017) and on scholarship that links welfare delivery to political participation (Khemani, 2022; Kruks Wisner, 2018). Additional reference is made to studies on gendered political engagement, digital welfare architecture and direct benefit transfer systems. The purpose of this article is analytical rather than predictive. It aims to situate the Bihar experience within a wider conceptual and empirical framework that illuminates the changing nature of electoral politics in India.

Classic Understandings of Populism

Cas Mudde defines populism as a thin centred ideology that imagines society as divided between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite” and insists that politics must directly express the general will (Mudde, 2004). Because it is thin centred, it can attach itself to a range of ideological projects including right wing, left wing or regionally specific imaginations of welfare, nationalism and identity. Mudde and Kaltwasser note that populism becomes powerful when leaders present themselves as direct protectors of ordinary citizens and construct emotional and symbolic shortcuts that bypass institutions and complex policy debates (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017).

Comparative research from Latin America demonstrates how populist leaders frequently combine emotive rhetoric with selective welfare delivery to cultivate direct affiliation with the masses (Hawkins, 2010; Roberts, 2015). These transfers are not incidental. They are political instruments through which belonging is reinforced and legitimacy is sustained. In India, populism has historically relied on religious mobilisation, symbolic gestures, charismatic leadership or caste-based appeals. Material transfers existed but did not shape political identity in the pronounced way witnessed today.

The current moment therefore extends rather than replaces classic understandings of populism. It adds a strong material and bureaucratically mediated dimension that is deeply embedded in the digital public infrastructure of the state. This dimension is responsible for the heightened immediacy with which political commitment is experienced.

Conceptualising Freebie Populism

Freebie populism represents a contemporary variant of populist mobilisation in which the primary bridge between leaders and citizens is constructed through direct material transfers rather than symbolic or rhetorical appeals alone. It does not replace classic definitions of populism but operationalises the promise of protection and recognition by making it tangible through targeted benefits. Cash transfers, subsidised electricity, expanded pensions, and free travel serve as visible proof of political commitment. These benefits act as recurring reminders that the state, often personified through political leadership, acknowledges the immediate material needs of citizens. Three features distinguish freebie populism from broader welfare politics. 

Immediacy is central, as transfers are often timed close to elections and their effects are felt within household budgets almost immediately. Voters therefore perceive the state not as a distant bureaucracy but as a source of immediate relief. 

Visibility is another critical feature. Digital transfers generate SMS alerts and bank notifications, and these alerts themselves function as instruments of political communication, turning a routine bureaucratic act into a concrete political moment. 

Personalised recognition is a third characteristic. Scholars note that direct transfers create a strong sense of being acknowledged by the state, particularly among women who manage household finances (Khemani, 2022). This personalisation transforms welfare from a bureaucratic entitlement into a more intimate political relationship between the individual and the state. 

Freebie populism does not erase caste or religious identities, which remain significant in shaping expectations and voting behaviour (Jaffrelot, 2021). However, welfare delivered directly to individual bank accounts establishes a new axis of political belonging. A woman from the Yadav or Paswan community may continue to retain group-based preferences, but her voting choices are also influenced by whether the state has reached her personally. The digital architecture of Aadhaar-linked transfers deepens this individualisation, making the relationship between the voter and the state more immediate, measurable, and experientially reliable.

Bihar and the Emergence of the Individual Beneficiary

The Bihar election demonstrates the mechanics of freebie populism with unusual clarity because the scale of targeted transfers was unprecedented. The distribution of ten thousand rupees to more than one crore twenty lakh women created a widespread perception that the state was acknowledging their economic vulnerability. This was part of a larger environment that included electricity bill relief, increased pensions and higher remuneration for frontline workers. These measures were repeatedly communicated through public meetings, local level messaging and digital outreach, ensuring that beneficiaries associated them with the ruling leadership.

The opposition attempted to counter this by centring women in its own campaign. Guarantee booklets, self-registration drives and targeted promises sought to build an alternative welfare narrative. Jan Suraj’s cards, for instance, attempted to construct a future oriented welfare claim. Yet the immediacy of actual deposits seemed to carry greater weight than future promises. Voters were able to verify receipt of benefits in the most tangible sense.

Turnout and voting patterns align closely with this political strategy. Women led the turnout in 130 constituencies, and the incumbent governing coalition won 114 of these. The fact that this alignment occurred during a period of intense welfare messaging suggests the strong influence of direct benefits on electoral behaviour. The political message materialised not as an abstract claim but as a verified deposit received through a mobile phone alert. Politics was increasingly experienced through the position of the individual beneficiary.

This alignment does not imply that welfare purchases votes. Rather it indicates that welfare is functioning as a channel through which political recognition, credibility and responsiveness are evaluated. Voters appear to be rewarding the government for delivering measurable relief and penalising actors whose promises remain untested.

Shifting Political Behaviour

The Bihar data indicates that freebie populism is reshaping political behaviour in ways that build on and extend earlier research. Scholars have noted that low-income voters are highly strategic and responsive to welfare delivery, often making reasoned decisions based on evidence of state performance (Khemani, 2022; Kruks Wisner, 2018). The Bihar experience reinforces this insight and highlights three important dimensions of change. 

First, welfare is increasingly becoming the primary language of political recognition. Women voters demonstrated exceptionally high turnout and a strong preference alignment in constituencies where welfare delivery was both visible and recent, suggesting that direct transfers and other targeted benefits have emerged as key instruments through which citizens assess the state’s commitment. 

Second, citizenship itself is being experienced through the household economy. This does not reduce political engagement to a transactional exchange but instead reflects a new democratic imagination in which the state operates as a direct economic actor within the household. For many women, welfare programmes provide relief from domestic pressures, enhance financial independence, and support caregiving responsibilities, thereby strengthening political agency. At the same time, political reasoning is increasingly grounded in immediacy. 

Third, freebie populism shifts the focus from abstract or long term developmental claims toward the voter’s immediate lived experience. Citizens evaluate political actors on the credibility, timing, and scale of benefit delivery and the responsiveness they witness in practice. This approach does not indicate passivity; rather, it reflects active and informed political calculation based on tangible outcomes and personal experience (Chauchard, 2017). 

Taken together, these patterns suggest that political loyalty is increasingly shaped by repeated and recognisable acts of recognition rather than broad ideological or identity-based appeals, signalling a profound shift in how democratic engagement is conceptualised and practiced.

These patterns resonate with findings from other democracies where targeted welfare provision has become central to electoral competition, including parts of Latin America and Southeast Asia. In such contexts, welfare delivery increasingly functions as both policy and political communication, blurring the boundary between governance and mobilisation. The Indian case therefore contributes to a growing comparative literature on how material distribution reshapes democratic participation under conditions of economic precarity.

Patterns Beyond Bihar

The pattern observed in Bihar is not an isolated development but part of a broader transformation in electoral politics across multiple Indian states. Welfare centred strategies have become essential elements of political competition, and their design increasingly reflects the logic of freebie populism, where visible and immediate benefits shape political belonging and voter behaviour. Each state offers a slightly different model, yet all demonstrate the growing centrality of targeted welfare in shaping electoral outcomes.

Jharkhand provides a clear example of this shift. The state expanded support for low-income women through age linked educational transfers and targeted assistance schemes that reached households directly. These interventions were not presented merely as development initiatives but became central to political communication, especially in rural districts where economic insecurity remains acute. The emphasis on young women and first-generation learners created a perception that the state was intervening meaningfully in the life chances of vulnerable households. Political actors highlighted these measures during election campaigns, illustrating how welfare has become a key electoral asset.

Maharashtra further demonstrates the consolidation of welfare centred politics. The Ladki Bahin Scheme placed women at the centre of the electoral narrative by offering regular financial assistance and presenting the state as an active participant in household welfare. The scheme was supported by recognisable branding, sustained outreach and continuous communication that associated the ruling leadership with direct support for women. This combination of financial transfers and symbolic visibility strengthened the perception that welfare was both a right and a political commitment, reinforcing the link between beneficiaries and the state.

Telangana presents another version of this emerging trend. Successive governments have relied heavily on targeted welfare, particularly through agricultural support schemes, marriage assistance programmes and community specific initiatives. These policies created strong emotional and material incentives for distinct social groups and demonstrated that welfare could be used strategically to cultivate enduring political alliances. Welfare delivery in Telangana has become an essential component of electoral mobilisation rather than a supplementary tool and continues to play a decisive role in shaping partisan loyalty.

Tamil Nadu offers one of the longest running traditions of welfare linked mobilisation in India. The contemporary phase builds on earlier frameworks but introduces new elements such as free bus travel for women, expanded meal schemes, higher pensions and targeted relief for vulnerable households. Welfare delivery is deeply integrated into political identity and party narratives. Campaigns consistently highlight the immediacy and continuity of state support, reinforcing the idea that welfare programmes are expressions of political care rather than bureaucratic entitlements.

Across these states, welfare is framed not merely as development but as a direct political relationship. This relationship is mediated through digital systems that enable individual bank transfers, local mobilisation networks that translate policy into political communication, frontline workers who act as intermediaries between the state and beneficiaries and the emotional resonance generated when citizens experience state recognition in concrete and material form. Together, these elements show how freebie populism has become a national phenomenon shaping political participation and redefining the meaning of electoral competition.

However, important differences remain across states. In Tamil Nadu and other states, welfare programmes are embedded within long-standing party institutions and ideological narratives, reducing their electoral immediacy. In contrast, states such as Bihar and Jharkhand exhibit a more episodic and election-timed deployment of benefits, intensifying their political salience. These variations suggest that freebie populism operates most strongly where welfare delivery is newly individualised and weakly institutionalised.

Limits of Attribution and Scope of Argument

This article advances an interpretive rather than causal argument between welfare transfers and electoral outcomes. Voting behaviour is shaped by multiple overlapping factors, including caste alignments, candidate credibility, party organisation, and broader political narratives. The observed alignment between women-led turnout and electoral outcomes in Bihar should therefore be read as indicative rather than deterministic.

The argument advanced here is that welfare delivery has acquired heightened political salience under conditions of digital transfer, electoral competition, and economic precarity. Direct benefits function as signals of state responsiveness that voters incorporate into broader political reasoning. This does not imply political passivity or vote-buying; rather, it reflects strategic and experiential evaluation by citizens based on verifiable state action. Future research using booth-level data or longitudinal beneficiary tracking would allow for more precise estimation of causal effects.

Conclusion

Welfare centred mobilisation has become a central feature of contemporary electoral competition in India. The Bihar assembly election provides a useful illustration of how direct and visible welfare delivery is reshaping patterns of political participation by foregrounding the individual beneficiary as a significant site of democratic engagement. High female turnout and the alignment of women dominated constituencies with electoral outcomes underline the growing importance of welfare as a medium through which citizens experience and evaluate state responsiveness.

This shift does not indicate a decline in political reasoning or a reduction of citizenship to transactional exchange. Instead, it reflects a reorientation of democratic judgement in which voters increasingly rely on observable and verifiable state action to assess political credibility. Welfare delivery, mediated through digital and bureaucratic systems, functions not only as policy intervention but also as a communicative practice that signals recognition, reliability, and proximity between the state and citizens.

At the same time, the increasing centrality of welfare in electoral mobilisation raises important questions for democratic accountability. An emphasis on immediacy and visibility may encourage short term distributive competition at the expense of institutional consolidation and sustained policy debate. As electoral legitimacy becomes more closely tied to the timing and scale of benefits, political contestation risks narrowing to questions of delivery rather than deliberation.

The broader challenge for Indian democracy therefore lies not in the expansion of welfare itself but in the political logic through which welfare is mobilised. Understanding how welfare delivery reshapes political participation, voter reasoning, and experiences of citizenship is essential to assessing the evolving character of democratic practice in India. The Bihar case suggests that future electoral outcomes will increasingly be shaped by how convincingly the state makes itself present in the everyday lives of citizens, alongside enduring influences of identity, ideology, and organisation. Beyond India, the analysis highlights how welfare delivery can reconfigure democratic engagement in contexts where citizens encounter the state most directly through material transfers.

 

(*) Saurabh Raj is a core team member at the Indian School of Democracy and is associated with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). He has a decade of experience in Indian politics and elections.

 

References

Aiyar, Y., and Walton, M. (2015). “Rights, accountability and citizenship: Examining India’s social welfare architecture.” Accountability Initiative.

Basu, P. (2021). “Women and electoral participation in India: Changing patterns of turnout and political engagement.” Economic and Political Weekly, 56(12), 34 to 42.

Chauchard, S. (2017). Why representation matters: The meaning of ethnic quotas in rural India. Cambridge University Press.

Election Commission of India. (2024). State Assembly Election Data: Bihar.

Hawkins, K. A. (2010). Venezuela’s Chavismo and populism in comparative perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Jaffrelot, C. (2021). Modi’s India: Hindu nationalism and the rise of ethnic democracy. Princeton University Press.

Khemani, S. (2022). “Political economy of welfare delivery in India.” World Bank Research Observer, 37(2), 245 to 270.

Kruks Wisner, G. (2018). Claiming the state: Active citizenship and social welfare in rural India. Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, C. (2004). “The populist zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541 to 563.

Mudde, C., and Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Roberts, K. M. (2015). Changing course in Latin America: Party systems in the neoliberal era. Cambridge University Press.

Footnotes

[1] Bihar, one of India’s most populous and economically disadvantaged states, has historically exhibited lower levels of state capacity and social welfare penetration, making recent shifts in voter participation particularly significant.

[2] A recently formed political party in Bihar positioning itself around governance and welfare reform.

Dr. Matías Bianchi is Director of Asuntos del Sur, a think tank in Buenos Aires.

Dr. Bianchi: Illiberal Actors No Longer Need to Pretend They Are Liberal

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeInterviews

In this wide-ranging interview with the ECPS, Dr. Matías Bianchi offers a powerful diagnosis of contemporary illiberalism. Moving beyond regime-centric explanations, Dr. Bianchi argues that today’s defining shift is normative: “illiberal actors no longer need to pretend they are liberal.” He shows how illiberalism now operates through transnational networks embedded within liberal democracies, sustained by funding, coordination, and discourse originating largely in the Global North. Highlighting the erosion of liberal legitimacy, the normalization of illiberal language, and the structural weakening of the nation-state, Dr. Bianchi underscores why democratic institutions struggle to respond—and what is at stake if they fail to adapt.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In an era marked by democratic backsliding, geopolitical fragmentation, and the global diffusion of illiberal norms, understanding the evolving nature of authoritarian and illiberal politics has become an urgent scholarly and policy task. In this in-depth interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Matías Bianchi, Director of Asuntos del Sur in Buenos Aires and co-author of “The Illiberal International,” offers a compelling diagnosis of contemporary illiberalism—one that departs decisively from regime-centric and state-centric explanations.

At the heart of Dr. Bianchi’s analysis lies a striking observation captured in the interview’s headline: “Illiberal actors no longer need to pretend they are liberal.” For Dr. Bianchi, the defining feature of the current moment is not the novelty of illiberal ideas themselves, but rather a profound normative and cultural shift that has lifted the constraints once requiring authoritarian or illiberal actors to cloak their agendas in liberal rhetoric. As he explains, “What we aim to show is that there is a set of actors working together and collaborating at different levels—geopolitical, institutional, and interpersonal—for whom liberal practices and ideas are no longer the goal.”

This “shedding of pretense,” as Dr. Bianchi describes it, represents a critical marker of the contemporary illiberal turn. Practices that were once “forbidden, punished, or had to be concealed are now openly articulated.” The symbolic need to maintain democratic façades—what Dr. Bianchi recalls through Fidel Castro’s claim that “we are a real democracy”—has eroded. “That veil is no longer necessary,” he argues, signaling a transformation not only in political behavior but also in the boundaries of legitimacy and civility within democratic publics.

Crucially, Dr. Bianchi situates illiberalism not as a discrete regime type but as a networked, relational political formation that increasingly operates within liberal democracies themselves. He emphasizes that many illiberal actors are embedded in ostensibly democratic systems—“in the European Union, the United States, or other contexts”—and that a major novelty of the past decade is that “much of the financing, support, and networking now originates from the US and Europe,” regions once seen as the pillars of the liberal international order.

Throughout the interview, Dr. Bianchi traces how cross-border coordination, transnational funding, and shared discursive strategies—exemplified by platforms such as The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) or slogans like “Make Europe Great Again”—have accelerated the normalization of illiberalism. These networks thrive amid what he identifies as a deeper crisis of liberalism itself: declining legitimacy, shrinking human rights cooperation, and the inability of liberal institutions to deliver material security, social inclusion, and credible governance in an increasingly unequal and digitally mediated global order.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Dr. Matías Bianchi, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Illiberal Actors Now Operate Openly Within Liberal Regimes

A banner depicts democracy as a leaf eaten by “caterpillars” named Putin, Kaczynski, Orban, Babis, Trump, and Fico on Labour Day, May 1, 2017 in Old Town Square, Prague. Photo: Jolanta Wojcicka.

Dr. Matías Bianchi, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: How do you conceptualize illiberalism in distinction from classical authoritarianism and competitive autocracy? In “The Illiberal International,” illiberalism appears neither reducible to established authoritarian rule nor fully captured by frameworks of competitive authoritarianism or democratic erosion. What core institutional and normative markers define this “illiberal international,” particularly in terms of its relationship to legality, electoralism, and claims to popular sovereignty?

Dr. Matías Bianchi: In our article, we do not engage in a fine-tuned conceptualization of each of the concepts you mentioned. Rather, what we aim to show is that there is a set of actors working together and collaborating at different levels—geopolitical, institutional, and interpersonal—for whom liberal practices and ideas are no longer the goal. Our liberal order, already weakened, is being challenged, and we are not entirely certain about the motivations behind this challenge. Some actors may be seeking greater financial resources, others may wish to control their political space, while others pursue more ideological objectives, such as creating a new order, as in the case of Javier Milei in Argentina. They may have different aims, but what they share is that liberal practices—such as the Woodrow Wilson–style liberal global order—are no longer central.

Traditionally, autocratic or authoritarian frameworks focus primarily on regimes. What we show, however, is that many of these illiberal actors are often operating within liberal regimes—such as those in the European Union, the United States, or other contexts. That is precisely what we seek to demonstrate. A key feature of the current situation is that much of the financing, support, and networking now originates from the US and Europe, which were once the primary sustainers of the liberal global order. This represents a major novelty of the past decade.

As for the practices or markers we observe, one of the most significant is a cultural shift that enables ideas and practices that existed before but are now expressed more openly. In a sense, there has been a shedding of pretense surrounding liberal ideas, allowing actors to operate more freely. This is an important marker. Practices that were once forbidden, punished, or had to be concealed are now openly articulated. Even in Cuba, Fidel Castro used to say, “We are a real democracy.” There was always a veil that needed to be maintained. I believe that this veil is no longer necessary, and that in itself is a telling marker.

Illiberalism Has Gone Transnational

What explains the shift from predominantly domestic processes of democratic backsliding to increasingly coordinated, cross-border illiberal networks? In your article, illiberalism appears less as a discrete regime type than as a relational, networked political formation. How does this reconceptualization challenge state-centric and regime-centric approaches in comparative politics and international relations?

Dr. Matías Bianchi: Many of the things I am going to say are not directly related to the article and are more my own ideas, and not necessarily shared with my co-authors. What we are witnessing is a contested situation. The world order we are living in still includes a liberal order, but it is lacking both legitimacy and power. At the same time, other actors are gaining momentum; they have more financial resources and greater cooperation across many areas, including technology and the military.

This operates at different levels, which is a crucial point. The key dimension here is the network—that these actors are collaborating more than ever before. If you look back a decade or two, these networks were far more limited. The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), for instance, was something quite restricted. “Make Europe Great Again” was either very limited or did not exist at all. Now, however, these spaces are becoming global. You have CPAC in Latin America, CPAC in Europe, and these platforms are expanding and increasingly sharing resources.

I think this development is related to the loss of pretense—that these ideas no longer need to be hidden. This, in turn, changes the game. There is more funding, while at the same time the liberal camp is lacking resources, lacking investment, and experiencing less cooperation. So, while this dynamic operates at different levels, the networks functioning simultaneously are particularly important.

For example, Tucker Carlson making Milei a global phenomenon, with hundreds of millions of viewers for his interviews, allows people across the United States to become familiar with this phenomenon. All of this network-based collaboration, to me, is absolutely crucial.

Illiberal Power Reveals Itself Through Discourse Before It Acts

Drawing on V-Dem data, the Authoritarian Collaboration Index, and your own empirical research, which indicators most effectively capture the qualitative transformation—not merely the quantitative expansion—of authoritarian cooperation in recent years? Which measures best reveal the growing organizational capacity, coordination, and strategic coherence of illiberal actors at the global level?

Dr. Matías Bianchi: Again, this goes beyond our analysis. I would say, once more, that the key element is the normative shift. There has been a change in what can be said at the level of language. Insults and the demonization of adversaries or other political actors have become more acceptable; at the level of discourse, the line of civility has shifted. This normative change is crucial, and it is followed by action. Language comes first.

When you start making statements such as “women are this,” or when Muslims or immigrants are targeted, you begin naming things, and then actions follow—ICE raids and other measures come afterward. So, the normative shift, in terms of what is allowed without penalties, is essential. In the past, if actions like those taken by Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or by others had occurred, there would have been phone calls from the White House or Brussels. There would have been at least threats involving investments, financial support, or other consequences.

I am not sure those calls exist anymore. All of these shifts occur, again, at the level of language, which has penetrated civic discourse within societies, but also at the global level, where the normative environment itself has changed. There is a fundamental normative shift at work.

When No One Enforces the Rules, Illiberal Networks Move Faster

This editorial image, captured in Belgrade, Serbia, showcases an array of novelty socks featuring the likenesses of Vladimir Putin, Aleksandr Lukashenko, Viktor Orban, and Donald Trump in Belgrade, Serbia on December 12, 2024. Photo: Jerome Cid.

Why have authoritarian and illiberal networks become more agile and effective than democratic alliances, despite the latter’s historical institutional advantages? To what extent do procedural neutrality, consensus-based decision-making, and legal formalism within liberal institutions create structural vulnerabilities that illiberal actors exploit?

Dr. Matías Bianchi: That is a very good question. I see liberal practices as a kind of social contract and a global contract. However, they need to be sustained by power. At some point, someone imposed those rules and others complied. I am not sure there is still sufficient power sustaining that liberal order at the international level, or in many cases at the national level. As a result, there is little punishment for violating it. So I am not sure this is primarily a question of institutional design; rather, it is a question of legitimacy. It is also about the fact that these regimes have not been delivering—both within countries and at the level of the global order.

International cooperation on human rights is shrinking. By 2026, it is estimated to be 50 percent lower than it was three years ago. Support for independent journalists, NGOs engaged in strategic human rights litigation, and networks of young leaders seeking to promote democratic practices have declined dramatically. At the same time, other arenas have gained resources and visibility, with social media playing a major role in amplifying influence and reach. That is part of a different discussion, but the bottom line is that there is no longer sufficient power sustaining that contract. So, again, I am not sure this is a question of design; it is more fundamentally about power.

Illiberal Networks Exploit 21st-Century Tools While Democracy Speaks in 20th-Century Language

Your analysis highlights how liberal institutions’ commitment to proceduralism and neutrality can be exploited from within. Is this best understood as an institutional design flaw, a crisis of political will, or a deeper contradiction within liberal constitutionalism itself?

Dr. Matías Bianchi: This partially relates to what I just said: the lack of legitimacy and the lack of power. At the same time, I want to emphasize that the global arena is contested. There is no clear winner. It has always been contested, but there was once a clear predominance of liberal, pro-democracy, and human-rights–oriented international regimes, while alternative models were weaker.

Today, the illiberal camp is growing, and illiberal networks and actors are increasingly effective in using 21st-century tools—misinformation, the manipulation and circulation of information, and the construction of conspiracy theories that support their worldview and preferred version of facts. A particularly important turning point was the pandemic, which exposed how nation-states and the international order lacked sufficient capacity to respond effectively. This moment acted as a major trigger; for instance, it coincides with the period when Milei entered politics.

These actors have been highly effective in exploiting digital communication, narratives, and misinformation, which have proven especially appealing. In particular, they have successfully mobilized people’s disappointment and anger. When populations became frustrated by real-life experiences—lockdowns, unemployment, children being forced into online learning, and the collapse of healthcare systems—these grievances were skillfully leveraged to generate resentment toward democracy and politics more broadly.

They have also been effective in promoting narratives such as “we are outsiders,” “we are going to drain the swamp,” or, as Milei puts it, attacking la casta, the political elite portrayed as the worst. Meanwhile, the democratic camp continues to rely on 20th-century tools—narratives that resonated in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s but are no longer persuasive today.

Why should I pay my taxes if education continues to deteriorate? Why should I contribute to my pension fund if I will receive very little when I retire? We continue to invoke narratives of the social contract, welfare, and liberal rights when lived realities no longer fully align with them, or at least do so far less than before. Illiberal actors have been very effective at exploiting this anger and loss of legitimacy. As we all know, when people are angry, those who manage to tap into that emotion can manipulate their will.

Illiberalism Grows Where the Nation-State Loses the Power to Set Boundaries

To what extent should the rise of the illiberal international be understood as the product of structural transformations in the global political economy—such as shifts in GDP distribution, energy interdependence, and technological capacity—rather than ideological convergence alone?

Dr. Matías Bianchi: This is part of my own research, so I will not bring my co-authors into this. My work is precisely about this issue. I am fully convinced that the crucial challenge lies in the weakening power of the nation-state. As we know, democracy flourished only when there was a strong nation-state—institutions capable of placing boundaries on de facto powers, whether capitalist entrepreneurs seeking to maximize profits, illegal actors, large media conglomerates, or other forms of concentrated power. Democracy functioned more effectively when the state was able to exert some control over these forces.

What we have witnessed is a long-term erosion of this capacity since the 1970s, driven by the deregulation of the financial sector and neoliberal policies that diminished the role of the state. This was followed by a series of crises—from the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the household debt crises of 2008 and 2013 to, most significantly, the COVID-19 pandemic, which marked a profound transformation. Today, inequality is no longer defined by the top 1 percent; rather, it is the top 0.01 percent, whose wealth has grown by a thousand percent over the past decade, while the bottom 50 percent of the world’s population has seen living standards stagnate or even decline.

This also raises the issue of sovereignty—the ability to regulate transnational commerce and transnational information flows. With the rise of social networks, we now face an unprecedented situation: privately owned platforms such as Twitter or X, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram function as their own media ecosystems, reaching billions of people worldwide. The lack of effective regulation means that these actors determine what is acceptable in public discourse, which voices are amplified, and which are marginalized.

All of these developments point to structural factors affecting sovereignty, the provision of public goods, and civic discourse—three key arenas of stateness. The problem is that nation-state institutions were designed for national boundaries, analog societies, and national markets, whereas today we inhabit digital, globalized societies. The central challenge, then, is how to rebuild political capacity—to recreate forms of stateness capable of regulating de facto powers in the current context.

Illicit Networks Spread as States Lose the Power to Enforce Rules

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission arrives for a EU Summit, at the EU headquarters in Brussels, on June 30, 2023. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.

How central are illicit financial flows, money laundering, and transnational corruption networks to the reproduction of illiberal politics within formally democratic systems? To what extent should these networks be understood not merely as enabling mechanisms but as constitutive pillars of contemporary illiberalism, shaping political competition, institutional capture, and democratic hollowing from within?

Dr. Matías Bianchi: This is part of the same answer. These dynamics have always been present in liberal systems. Money laundering, drug trafficking, and weapons trafficking have long existed. What has changed is our capacity to control them. There is now less power to set and enforce rules.

As a result, these practices have, in a sense, spread. This is something we show in our article. There is no longer a clear “axis of evil” overseeing what were once perceived as isolated authoritarian or illiberal practices. Instead, these dynamics have become far more widespread. We now see even middle powers, such as Turkey or Hungary, exercising influence—for example, Hungary funding the Vox political party in Spain, or Vox supporting Kast in Chile.

This points to a broader diffusion of such practices and, at the same time, to fewer constraints, fewer penalties, and weaker deterrents against this kind of behavior.

When Norms Shift, Language Turns into Action

Events such as The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and “Make Europe Great Again” blur boundaries between conventional conservatism and authoritarian narratives. How does this discursive hybridization accelerate the normalization of illiberalism within democratic publics?

Dr. Matías Bianchi: There is a widespread diffusion of these practices that, again, were present before. Many of these ideas existed previously, but now they operate without constraints. The change—the normative shift in these cases—is crucial. It is crucial for redefining the boundaries of civic space and for determining what is considered acceptable or unacceptable in public debate.

These dynamics generate cultural change, and that cultural change is central in these arenas. It allows actions to follow that have meaningful impact. Although we might initially see this as merely a matter of language or narratives—about women, about feminists being labeled as fascists, and similar claims—there are people who act upon these narratives.

One striking example from a couple of months ago in Argentina involved a political activist of Milei who killed all the women in his family and was constantly mobilized by anti-feminist narratives. A similar dynamic can be observed in the United States with ICE and immigration, where many volunteers actively work for ICE.

That is what is changing. These networks, again, existed before, or at least similar networks existed, but they were marginal and could not operate so openly. Now they are visible, awarding prizes and running their own news outlets, and that represents a major change.

The Global Order No Longer Polices Illiberal Behavior

How do authoritarian or illiberal middle powers—such as Turkey, the UAE, Hungary, and Saudi Arabia—operate as brokers or hubs within transnational illiberal networks, and how does their intermediary role complicate binary distinctions between “core” and “peripheral” autocracies in the global authoritarian ecosystem?

Dr. Matías Bianchi: I have already touched on this, but I want to return to the issue of the erosion of the global order. In the past, at least, a middle power selling weapons had to ask for permission. Today, there is a much freer flow of such activities. For example, the Emirates selling weapons to rogue regimes, or Hungary funding Vox, as I mentioned earlier. There is far less control over these actions. As a result, it is no longer just the “axis of evil” that we used to think about 20 years ago. These dynamics are now widespread at different levels, and this reflects a broader shift in the balance of the global order.

Russia Disrupts, China Builds—and Democracy Must Respond Differently

The Indian Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, is pictured with the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, and the President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, in Goa, India on May 25, 2019. Photo: Shutterstock.

How do Russia and China differ in their modalities of illiberal influence—financial, ideological, technological, and diplomatic—and where do their strategies converge? How should we analytically distinguish Russia’s coercive and disruptive practices from China’s more institutionalized, developmental, and techno-governance–oriented approaches, and what do these differences imply for the design of effective democratic counter-strategies?

Dr. Matías Bianchi: That is a very good question. Russia has less soft power and relies more heavily on hard power, particularly through cyberattacks and arms sales. This calls for a specific set of responses, including stronger cybersecurity measures, better control over weapons distribution, and more effective countermeasures against disinformation.

China, by contrast, is more complex. It is the second-largest economy in the world and the largest foreign investor in roughly half of the world’s countries. Its influence operates largely through development investments, as you noted—building bridges, infrastructure, highways, and nuclear plants. This requires a different kind of response. The problem is that the United States and the European Union have been retracting from development investment. This is not only about recent USAID cuts; it has been happening for a long time. Meanwhile, China has been expanding the Maritime Silk Road through investment and trade, even in countries that are not particularly sympathetic to China’s political ideas, such as Chile under its new government, which nevertheless maintains very strong commercial ties with China.

This form of influence demands a different response—one based on greater investment and more credible policies. During the Pax Americana, the United States and Europe, in their hegemonic roles, often acted “under the table.” We should recall that the US funded many military coups in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century, and that Europe has had deeply problematic practices in Africa for decades. This duality has always existed; it is not a simple story of good and bad actors. However, as Western actors retract and offer less, these contradictions become more visible and more damaging.

In this context, the risk is that some regimes are openly calling out what they perceive as the hypocrisy of Europe and the United States: “You are not offering as much as they are. They are building schools and infrastructure, and you are not.”As a result, democratic strategies must be different and more complex. It is not only about money; it is also about credibility—being credible in contracts and in international agreements. Credibility itself is central.

Democracy Must Be Made Attractive Again—Across All Levels

Are existing global and regional institutions reformable enough to confront the illiberal international, or do we need entirely new organizational forms?

Dr. Matías Bianchi: Political scientists are trained more to analyze past events than to forecast the future. But I would say that we need to look at the larger picture and think strategically. If we want to restore the strength of a liberal order based on human rights, respect for people, economic development, and a sense of equality and inclusion, we need to rethink how we build the political muscle to sustain it.

As I said before, in my opinion, the major crisis is that the institutional framework we have—the nation-state—lacks power. And it is not simply about going back to the nation-state. We need to restore ideas of stateness, sovereignty, the provision of public goods, and the creation of a civic community. The question is: what institutional frameworks, powers, and financial resources can sustain that? I feel that the nation-state alone is no longer sufficient. So the broader strategic challenge—the forest, not just the trees—is how we rebuild democratic power.

At the same time, we need to think about tactics. We need to make democracy more attractive, not by relying on the narratives of the 1950s and 1960s, but by speaking the language of our time and developing more appealing communication strategies. We need to strengthen networks of people who want to live in democracy, who still believe in it, and who want to defend it.

We need also to work at the geopolitical level, at the level of institutional networks, but also at the community and even individual levels. For example, in schools, we see emerging practices in different countries focused on critical thinking—teaching people to recognize when they are being exposed to misinformation or manipulation strategies, and to take a step back. At the same time, we need to think carefully about how we treat our neighbors, how we speak to our peers, and how we engage with our political opponents. I feel that, tactically, we need to think across these different levels where we can act, while at the same time conceptualizing and building new political power to sustain a rules-based, rights-based society.

Without a More Honest Global Order, Polarization and Conflict Will Deepen

UN Security Council meeting on the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, New York, August 25, 2016. Photo: Ognjen Stevanovic.

And lastly, Dr. Bianchi, under what conditions could democratic coordination regain momentum, and what do you see as the most plausible best- and worst-case scenarios for liberal democracy over the next decade?

Dr. Matías Bianchi: I think the next decade will be highly contested. I feel that things could go very wrong. We currently have several wars underway, any of which could escalate at any moment. We also face irresponsible global leadership. In Washington, for example, the language toward China shifted four or five years ago; policymakers no longer speak of an adversary but of an enemy. With that mindset, things can indeed go very wrong.

We could face a severe scenario marked by war and increasing societal polarization—developments we have experienced before and that we do not want to return to. At the same time, the desire for order has not disappeared. Clearly, we need to build a better one: a more honest order, one in which the Global South has greater influence and in which power and resources are more equitably distributed.

The United States and Europe still have an opportunity to help shape the rules of this order. However, they need to understand that these rules can no longer be based on hegemonic dominance, or on the United States acting as a hegemon in particular. Instead, the focus must be on designing rules that meaningfully include emerging powers, especially China.

If this does not happen, current trends will continue: China will further distance itself from liberal institutions and expand its own alternatives—such as the BRICS and other trade and financial frameworks. This will only deepen a bifurcated global order. There is much that could be done with greater generosity and a stronger commitment to inclusion, particularly toward the Global South and Asia.

Turkish women took action on May 8, 2020 in Istanbul not to repeal the Istanbul Convention, which provides protection against domestic and male violence. Photo: Emre Orman.

Iran and Turkey through ‘The Golden Cage’ and ‘Contextual Gendered Racialization’ Lens: Populism, Law, Gender and Freedom

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceGenderHomeHuman Rights

In this commentary, Dr. Hafza Girdap offers a compelling comparative analysis of populism, law, gender, and freedom across two authoritarian contexts. Bringing Shirin Ebadi’s “The Golden Cage” into dialogue with transnational feminist theory, Dr. Girdap examines how populist regimes in Iran and Turkey moralize “the people,” narrow citizenship, and weaponize law to discipline dissent—particularly women’s dissent. Drawing on her original framework of contextual gendered racialization, she shows how gender governance operates through both patriarchy and racialized belonging. The article foregrounds women’s resistance as a form of epistemic, legal, and care-centered praxis, redefining freedom not as order or security, but as memory, accountability, and collective struggle beyond the confines of the “golden cage.”

By Hafza Girdap

This piece offers a condensed commentary drawn from a broader, ongoing project of mine that seeks to trace a coherent trajectory bridging sociology, feminist theory, and human rights practice. Centering the experiences of racialized and marginalized women, my project examines how women actively reclaim voice, produce knowledge, and build solidarities across borders. By integrating scholarship with activism, it aims not only to interpret structures of oppression but also to intervene in them—amplifying marginalized women’s voices, reshaping public discourse, and contributing to justice-oriented social change at both local and global levels.

Within this framework, the article examines populism, gendered repression, and resistance in Iran and Turkey by bringing Shirin Ebadi’s The Golden Cage into dialogue with transnational feminist theory and my conceptual framework of contextual gendered racialization.

Across both cases, populism constructs a moralized vision of “the people,” narrows plural citizenship, and weaponizes law to discipline dissent, particularly women’s dissent. Read together, Iran and Turkey reveal a shared trajectory from revolutionary or reformist promise to authoritarian consolidation, where legality becomes an instrument of domination, intimacy is reorganized by fear, and women’s resistance redefines freedom not as comfort or order, but as accountability, memory, and collective care (Shabnam, 2016).

Populism and the Moral Community

In post-1979 Iran, Islamist populism intertwined anti-imperialism with religious moralism, deifying state power as the authentic voice of the ummah and framing dissent as moral deviance or foreign betrayal. Hardship, repression, and top-down governance are justified as ethical sacrifice, while sovereignty is equated with the regime itself (Qaderi et al., 2023; V for Human, 2025; Bottura, 2024).  

In Turkey, the populism of ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan evolved from counter-Kemalist majoritarianism into a religio-nationalist project that performs unity through slogans such as “one nation, one flag, one religion,” increasingly centralizing authority in the figure of the leader. While initially framed as democratizing, this project narrowed citizenship through moral conformity, loyalty, and cultural homogeneity (Yalvaç & Joseph, 2019; Yabancı, 2022). 

Ebadi’s metaphor of the “golden cage” captures the populist bargain in both contexts: material security, national pride, and moral certainty are offered in exchange for silence. Belonging becomes conditional, and pluralism is redefined as threat. Populism thus does not merely mobilize “the people”; it redraws their boundaries.

From Rule of Law to Rule-by-Law

Ebadi’s central assertion, “law without justice is violence,” resonates powerfully across both cases. In Iran, juridical language legitimates repression through moralized penalties, surveillance, and gender policing. Courts, decrees, and security forces recode dissent, especially women’s défiance, as disorder, immorality, or national betrayal. Following the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, intensified surveillance technologies and punitive legislation targeted women’s everyday presence in public space (V for Human, 2025, Makooi, 2025).

In Turkey, a shift from institutional reform to rule-by-law recalibrated the judiciary, media, and religious institutions to executive power. Gender governance became a central showcase of this transformation. The withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention via presidential decree exemplified how formal legality can be used to hollow out rights while projecting a moralized policy turn. In both contexts, legality masks authoritarian consolidation, transforming law into a technology of control rather than protection (Girdap, 2021; Sarac et al., 2023).

Family, Fear, and Everyday Life

The Golden Cage demonstrates how authoritarianism penetrates the most intimate spaces of life. Ebadi’s family narrative traces siblings forced into divergent ethical trajectories; revolutionary idealism punished by imprisonment or execution, loyalist complicity pursued for survival, exile chosen at the cost of belonging. Love and loyalty become calculations of risk under surveillance.

Ebadi’s family members function as ethical projections under coercion: the revolutionary idealist destroyed by the system, the loyalist navigating compromise at psychological cost, and the exile living with safety and loss. Ebadi herself stands as the ethical center, a jurist-witness insisting that memory is a civic duty and that law must be reclaimed for justice. Her feminism is not abstract; it is anchored in accountability, testimony, and refusal to forget.

Contemporary Turkey echoes this intimate violence. Employment bans, travel restrictions, stigmatization of dissidents, and criminalization of speech ripple through households. Families become sites of risk management; ordinary communication is shaped by caution. The political becomes domestic, and repression is lived not only through spectacular events but through everyday self-censorship and fractured trust.

Gender as the Authoritarian and Democratic Measure

Gender emerges as both the primary target of authoritarian control and the most sensitive measure of democratic erosion. In Iran, women led the Woman, Life, Freedom movement following the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini. Despite lethal repression, mass arrests, and intensified surveillance, women’s everyday practices, particularly in urban spaces, signal irreversible shifts in presence, visibility, and refusal (European Parliament, 2022; Blout, 2025).

In Turkey, women’s citizenship is increasingly restricted into motherhood, family duty, and moral loyalty. Feminism and LGBTQI+ activism are framed as moral and foreign threats, while patriarchal governance is legitimated through religious and nationalist discourse. The Istanbul Convention withdrawal galvanized resistance, making gender a central site through which democratic backsliding and civic resilience are simultaneously revealed.

My framework of contextual gendered racialization sharpens this analysis by showing how Sunni Turkishness is privileged through an ethno-religious “Turkishness Contract,” producing double marginalization for Kurdish, Alevi, Armenian, and dissenting women. Gendered governance thus operates through both patriarchy and racialized belonging (Unlu, 2023).

Transnational Racialization and Migration

Racialization travels across borders. In Turkey, difference is marked through proximity to dominant Sunni Turkish identity rather than skin color; minority women are symbolically racialized as deviant or suspect. In the United States, Muslim women become hyper-visible within Islamophobic regimes of surveillance, legally white, socially brown (Aziz, 2020). Hijab, accent, and names trigger institutional scrutiny across immigration, healthcare, education, and labor.

Women respond through strategic identity management: negotiating visibility, silence, and speech; altering dress or disclosure; cultivating selective belonging. These practices constitute feminist praxis rather than mere adaptation, resisting both authoritarian repression and reductive Western feminist frames. Situated feminisms emerge from lived negotiation rather than abstraction (Girdap, 2025).

Law, Memory, and Care as Resistance

Across Iran and Turkey, women deploy diverse resistance strategies that transform opposition from episodic protest into durable institution-building. Ebadi’s ethic of defending rights even within captured institutions finds parallels in feminist lawfare and documentation practices in Turkey. Litigation, femicide databases, survivor testimonies, and non-enforcement audits preserve public memory and sustain accountability even when legal victories are limited. As national protections erode, opposition-led municipalities expand shelters, hotlines, training, and care infrastructures, producing constituent feminism beyond electoral cycles. Campaigns such as #İstanbulSözleşmesiYaşatır (#IstanbulConventionSavesLives) and recurring protests after femicides sustain public scrutiny and agenda pressure. Groups like Mor Dayanışma link gender violence to labor precarity, militarism, ethnic repression, and anti-LGBTQI+ moral panics, expanding coalitions and articulating care-centered, class-conscious feminist praxis (Mor Dayanışma, 2025; Najdi, 2025; Şeker & Sönmezocak, 2021).

Conclusion: Freedom Beyond the Golden Cage

Bringing Ebadi’s ethic of law, memory, and freedom together with a transnational feminist analysis clarifies the stakes of the Iran–Turkey comparison. In both contexts, populism narrows [established] citizenship into a moral community, and gender becomes the key nexus of belonging. Yet women’s epistemic and practical resistance, through legal advocacy, documentation, care spaces, migration, and transnational solidarity, takes a huge step to widen citizenship back into rights, pluralism, and accountability.

Freedom, in this sense, is not comfort or order. It is collective remembering, feminist institution-building, and sustained struggle against normalization. The golden cage is broken not by silence, but by women who insist on memory, justice, and shared political futures across borders.

 

References

Aziz, Sahar F. (2020). “Legally White, Socially Brown: Racialization of Middle Eastern Americans.” In: Routledge Handbook on Islam and Race (ed. Zain Abdullah), Rutgers Law School Research Paper No. Forthcoming, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3592699 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3592699

Blout, Emily. (2025, September 16). “Resisting Iran’s High-Tech War on Women Three Years After Mahsa Amini’s Death.” Stimson. https://www.stimson.org/2025/resisting-irans-high-tech-war-on-women-mahsa-amini/

Bottura, Beatrice. (2024). “Theocracy, Radicalism and Islamist/Secular Populism in Iran, Afghanistan & Tajikistan.”European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). October 18, 2024. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0089

European Parliament. (2022). Protests in Iran over the death of Mahsa Amini.https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2022/733671/EPRS_ATA%282022%29733671_EN.pdf

Girdap, Hafza. (2021). “Right-wing populism, political Islam, and the Istanbul Convention.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). https://www.populismstudies.org/right-wing-populism-political-islam-and-the-istanbul-convention/

Girdap, H. (2025). “Racialization and Response Through Embodied Identification.” In: From a Shadow to a Person: A Gender Studies Assessment of Women in the Middle East, edited by Shilan Fuad Hussain, Routledge, manuscript in preparation.

Holliday, Shabnam J. (2016). “The legacy of subalternity and Gramsci’s national–popular: populist discourse in the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Third World Quarterly, 37:5, 917-933, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1113872

Makooi, Bahar. (2025, September 9). “Three years after Mahsa Amini’s death, Iranian women have seized ‘irreversible’ liberties.” France 24. https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20250916-three-years-after-mahsa-amini-death-iranian-women-have-seized-irreversible-liberties

Mor Dayanışma. (2025, February 11). “Women, Work, and War: Organizing and Resistance in Turkey – an Interview with Mor Dayanışma.” https://www.mordayanisma.org/2025/02/11/women-work-and-war-organizing-and-resistance-in-turkey-an-interview-with-mor-dayanisma/

Najdi, Youhanna. (2025, September 16). “Mahsa Amini: 3 years on, will Iran face fresh protests?” DW.https://www.dw.com/en/mahsa-amini-3-years-on-will-iran-face-fresh-protests/a-74000756

Qaderi, H.; Delavari, A. and Golmohammadi, A. (2023). “Populism and Politics in Iran after the Islamic Revolution: Content Analysis of Presidential Speeches from 1989 to 2017.” Political Strategic Studies, 12(44), 9-58. doi: 10.22054/qpss.2022.66333.3002

Sarac, B. N.; Girdap, H., & Hiemstra, N. (2023). “Gendered state violence and post-coup migration out of Turkey.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 99, 102796. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2023.102796

Şeker, Berfu and Sönmezocak, Ezel Buse. (2021, June). “Withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention: War on Gender Equality in Turkey.” Freedom House. https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/06292021_Freedom_House_Turkey_Policy_Brief-2-Withdrawal-from-the-Istanbul-Convention.pdf

Unlu, B. (2023). “The Turkishness contract and the formation of Turkishness.” In: F. M. Gocek & A. Alemdaroglu (Eds.), Kurds in Dark Times. Syracuse University Press.

V for Human (2025, August 12). Erased from the Scene: Türkiye’s Withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention. https://www.vforhuman.org/publications/erased-from-the-scene

Yabancı, B. (2022). “Religion, nationalism, and populism in Turkey under the AKP.” Middle East Institute. https://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/2022-10/Religion%2C%20Nationalism%2C%20and%20Populism%20in%20Turkey%20Under%20the%20AKP.pdf

Yalvaç, F. & Joseph, J. (2019). “Understanding populist politics in Turkey: a hegemonic depth approach.” Review of International Studies, 45(5), 786–804. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26843268

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is showing victory sign with both hand to supporters at Bharatiya Janata Party office amid the results of the Indian General Elections 2024 in New Delhi, India on June 4 2024. Photo: PradeepGaurs.

Bihar Provincial Assembly Elections Boost Modi’s Populism

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceHome

In his incisive analysis, Dr. Amir Ali, examines how the 2025 Bihar Provincial Assembly elections have reinvigorated Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s populist dominance in Indian politics. Situating Bihar’s results within India’s shifting electoral landscape, Dr. Ali shows how the BJP-led coalition’s victory undermines expectations of anti-incumbency following the party’s 2024 parliamentary setback. He critically engages controversies surrounding the Election Commission of India, welfare-driven electoral strategies, and the shrinking space for opposition politics. Drawing on his broader scholarship on populism, democracy, and sovereignty, Dr. Ali warns that the consolidation of power from “Parliament to Panchayat” raises serious concerns for institutional autonomy and democratic accountability in what V-Dem has termed an “electoral autocracy.”

Amir Ali*

The recently concluded election in the eastern Indian province of Bihar in early November 2025 was a shot in the arm for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Bihar is one of the poorest provinces of the country with a per capita income that is a mere fraction of richer provinces. High unemployment levels result in outflux of unskilled workers. Among the controversies that plagued the Bihar assembly elections was the running of special trains carrying Bihari workers from the northern province of Haryana that abuts the national capital Delhi, back to their native province, to ensure they could vote.

Despite its economic backwardness, Bihar is politically very important. The ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is today the dominant political party in the country. It has replaced the earlier one-party dominant system of the Indian National Congress, that led India’s freedom struggle against British colonial rule. The BJP is at the center of the ruling coalition called the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). In the province of Bihar, the coalition partner of the BJP is the Janata Dal United JD(U) whose party boss, Nitish Kumar has been Chief Minister since 2005. Nitish Kumar is a leader whose political origins lie in samaajwaad or Indian socialism. Mr. Kumar is also known for his constant political flip-flops as he has constantly switched sides to continue in power. Back in 2015 he successfully fought the election in alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). This time the RJD was competing against him, winning only 25 seats.

The alliance between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Janata Dal United JD(U) performed surprisingly well, winning together with other smaller allied parties, 202 seats in the 243-seat legislative assembly. The result was a major blow for the opposition I.N.D.I.A alliance that includes the once powerful Congress Party. The resounding victory of the ruling BJP led alliance means a further political consolidation, captured in a stated desire to prevail over Indian politics from ‘Parliament to Panchayat’ (the lowest tier of local self-governance at the level of the village). The ruling BJP has also expressed an intent to rid the country of the supposed baleful presence of the Congress that is captured in the Hindi expression of a Congress mukt Bharat (India/Bharat rid of the Congress). 

The shrinking of the opposition becomes a cause for concern, especially as India has been characterized by the V-Dem institute as an ‘electoral autocracy.’ The provincial assembly election in Bihar needs to be seen in the backdrop of the 2024 parliamentary elections in which the ruling BJP suffered a setback as its numbers declined from 303 in 2019 to 240, forcing it into relying on significant support from coalition partners. This was viewed by the opposition as signaling a waning of the electoral dominance of the BJP.

Two Developments in the Run-up to the Election

The run up to the Bihar assembly election in early November 2025 was marked by two developments. The first was the announcement by the Election Commission of India (ECI) to conduct a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, four months prior to the elections. This became controversial on account of the onerous demands of documentation put on voters to ensure their names were on the voters’ list. The opposition immediately protested and appealed to the Supreme Court of India, which did not stop the SIR exercise, but demanded lenient consideration in terms of the documents that voters were required to produce. The opposition had hoped to make the revision of electoral rolls an issue in the elections, suggesting in their campaigns that the ruling BJP was conniving with the Election Commission of India to ‘steal’ votes. 

The aspersions cast on the Election Commission of India are unfortunate. It is a constitutional body that under Article 324 of the constitution is guaranteed autonomy from the executive to conduct free and fair elections. The Election Commission of India has generally been above board in terms of its conduct with a succession of Chief Election Commissioners, who head the institution, taking independently assertive positions against ruling governments. If the opposition’s allegations about lack of autonomy of the Election Commission are true, then this would tend to underline the anti-institutional element, characteristic of much populist politics that while exaggeratedly elevating the purity of the people, excoriates the very institutions that mediate the people’s will. The leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party has conducted a series of explosive press conferences where he has displayed proof of the Election Commission of India’s ‘conniving’ with the ruling BJP to ensure the latter’s electoral victory.

The second significant development in the run up to the elections was the decision taken by the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar to announce the disbursal of ten thousand rupees (95.75 Euros) for women voters under a scheme to promote women’s self-employment. Analysts felt that this was decisive in terms of winning the elections for the ruling NDA coalition. Opponents of the ruling coalition cried foul at the decision announced in late September 2025. This was just before the model code of conduct came into place. Such announcements are seen as an infringement of the model code of conduct as they may induce votes in favor of the ruling party.

Whither Anti-incumbency?

The election results from Bihar impart momentum to the ruling BJP led coalition as the year 2025 closes. Next year in early 2026, provincial assembly elections are due in two more states further to the east of Bihar, in the provinces of West Bengal and Assam. The elections result in Bihar, especially considered in the light of the electoral setback that the BJP suffered in the parliamentary elections at the federal level in early 2024, seem to put paid to the phenomenon of anti-incumbency which refers to the uphill task that an incumbent party experiences as it seeks re-election. The BJP’s dominance seems to defy what in India is called the law of anti-incumbency.

 

(*) Dr. Amir Ali is a faculty member at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Prior to this he taught at the Department of Political Science, Jamia Millia Islamia University. He was Agatha Harrison Memorial Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford between the years 2012 to 2014. He has authored two books South Asian Islam and British Multiculturalism (Routledge, 2016) and Brexit and Liberal Democracy: Populism, Sovereignty and the Nation-State (Routledge, 2022). His areas of teaching, research and writing are political theory, multiculturalism, group rights, British politics and political Islam. His regularly written political commentary on Indian and global politics has appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly, Al Jazeera English, the Indian periodical Outlook and in Indian broadsheet newspapers such as The Indian Express, The Hindu, and The Telegraph. 

Dr. Robert Butler is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Languages at the University of Lorraine (Nancy).

Dr. Butler on Trump’s European Strategy: Non-Intervention Can Itself Become a Form of Intervention

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeInterviews

In this interview with the ECPS, Dr. Robert Butler, Senior Lecturer at the University of Lorraine, examines how far-right actors in France and the UK construct legitimacy amid crisis and geopolitical uncertainty. Drawing on critical and multimodal discourse analysis, Dr. Butler explores authorization, crisis narratives, and moral evaluation in the rhetoric of Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, and Nigel Farage. Reflecting on Trump’s return to power, he cautions against simplistic readings of transatlantic influence, arguing that framing Europe as “weak and vulnerable” may have concrete political effects. As Dr. Butler strikingly notes, “non-intervention itself becomes a form of intervention,” reshaping sovereignty, responsibility, and counter-mobilization across Europe.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Robert Butler, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Languages at the University of Lorraine (Nancy) and editor of Political Discourse Analysis: Legitimisation Strategies in Crisis and Conflict, offers a nuanced comparative analysis of far-right discourse in France and the United Kingdom. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and multimodal approaches, Dr. Butler examines how contemporary populist and far-right actors seek legitimacy in what he characterizes as a “de-legitimized political world.”

Across the interview, Dr. Butler emphasizes that far-right actors such as Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, and Nigel Farage rely heavily on authorization as a legitimization strategy, combining appeals to the personal authority of leaders with increasing references to impersonal authority, particularly “the rule of law.” As he notes, “we see authorization at work: the personal authority of leaders, alongside reliance on impersonal authority.” This dual strategy allows far-right actors to distance themselves from overt radicalism while positioning themselves as credible governing alternatives.

A central theme of the interview is the discursive construction of crisis. In the UK context, Dr. Butler explains that Reform UK frames crisis as systemic collapse, encapsulated in the slogan “Britain is broken,” while in France, the National Rally (NR) increasingly portrays crisis through the lens of economic sovereignty, borders, and protection of domestic production. These crisis narratives are not only rhetorical devices but also serve to justify policy claims that move “beyond moral evaluation” toward what Dr. Butler calls “the realm of substance.”

The interview’s headline theme emerges most clearly in Dr. Butler’s reflections on international crises and Donald Trump’s return to power. Addressing whether Trump acts as a catalyst for far-right normalization in Europe, Dr. Butler cautions against linear assumptions. Instead, he highlights how Trumpian discourse increasingly frames European leaders as “weak and vulnerable,” raising fundamental questions about sovereignty, protection, and authority. Crucially, Dr. Butler argues that a politics of disengagement may carry unintended consequences, noting that “non-intervention itself becomes a form of intervention.”

This insight anchors the interview’s broader contribution: far-right legitimization does not rely solely on overt alignment with radical allies but often involves strategic distancing, ambiguity, and moral labeling. As Dr. Butler puts it, describing states as weak may function as “a form of moral evaluation” that lacks substance yet reshapes political expectations and responsibilities.

By combining close discourse analysis with comparative political insight, this interview sheds light on how far-right actors navigate legitimacy, crisis, and authority—both domestically and internationally—at a moment when the boundaries between intervention, sovereignty, and normalization are increasingly blurred.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Dr. Robert Butler, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Delegitimizing Elites, Authorizing Leaders

Nigel Farage speaking in Dover, Kent, UK, on May 28, 2024, in support of the Reform Party, of which he is President. Photo: Sean Aidan Calderbank.

Dr. Robert Butler, thank you so very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: From your perspective as editor of “Political Discourse Analysis: Legitimisation Strategies in Crisis and Conflict,” how would you characterize the dominant legitimization strategies used by Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage when they present themselves as defenders of “the people” against distant elites? Do these strategies converge across France and the UK, or are they embedded in quite distinct national political cultures?

Dr. Robert Butler: I haven’t done specific research on the situation in France, so I’ve looked, to some extent, at developments in the UK, particularly Reform UK. What I would say is that there is a clear delegitimization of the establishment and the parties in power in both countries.

In terms of the actual legitimization strategies used, I think they do, in both contexts, draw on what Theo van Leeuwen refers to in his seminal 2007 article on legitimization and legitimation—namely, authorization. There is a strong emphasis on the personal authority of leaders: Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella in France, and Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, in the UK.

There is an appeal to personal authority, but I also think there is a growing appeal to impersonal authority, particularly the rule of law—emphasizing the need to respect the law and to operate within its parameters.

So, very much in terms of legitimization strategies, and following Van Leeuwen’s approach, we see authorization at work: the personal authority of leaders, alongside reliance on impersonal authority, namely the rule of law.

Performing Insecurity Through Multimodal Authority

In your work on authority and multimodal discourse, you stress how gesture, intonation, and visual framing help construct political identity. How do you see these multimodal resources operating in the performances of Farage and Le Pen (and now Jordan Bardella) when they dramatize insecurity, crisis, or loss of control?

Dr. Robert Butler: I would say that, again, my focus has been on Reform UK rather than on the Rassemblement National in France, the National Rally. That said, what we can observe in both cases is a significant use of gesture, with gestures playing an important role alongside discourse.

In particular, with Farage, we see frequent use of what we call open-hand supine gestures, where the hands are held with the palms facing upwards, often accompanied by outward and upward movements. These gestures can serve a pragmatic function, signaling uncertainty—conveying a sense of “I don’t know” or “what is there?”—and suggesting that the situation is difficult to interpret.

This is a significant gesture because it contributes to the audience’s impression that the situation is politically untenable, that there is a broader social situation that needs to be managed. Accordingly, open-hand gestures appear frequently, often with a wide space between the hands.

From what I have observed, we also see this with the National Rally in France: broader gestures and extensive use of the hands. Visually, this reinforces the audience’s impression that something needs to be done, that there is uncertainty about what that should be, and that the situation they face is untenable.

From Slogans to Substance in Far-Right Legitimation

Marine Le Pen, from the Front National, a national-conservative political party in France in meeting for the presidential election of 2017 at the Zenith of Paris on April 17, 2017. Photo: Frederic Legrand.

One of the core themes of your edited volume is the challenge of sustaining legitimacy in a “de-legitimized political world.” To what extent has the far right in France and the UK successfully exploited this legitimacy deficit—especially the erosion of trust in parties, media, and expert authority—and what limits do you see to this strategy?

Dr. Robert Butler: There has been a significant challenge to the legitimacy of established political parties—particularly catch-all parties—in power in both the UK and France. Again, drawing on Van Leeuwen’s 2007 article on legitimization and legitimization strategies, the challenge has been to move beyond what he calls moral evaluation—that is, the use of words or slogans that carry little meaning beyond statements such as “we are democratic” or “we believe in freedom,” where values are not supported by substantive action. The parties—what we refer to as the far right—have themselves moved beyond moral evaluation and are increasingly operating in the realm of substance when justifying their positions.

This can be seen, for example, in an interview Bardella gave several months ago, in which he called out the Ministry of the Economy and Finance’s claims that businesses should be patriotic. He frames this as a form of moral evaluation—without stating it explicitly—suggesting that it amounts to little more than words. Here, we see something that can be assimilated to moral evaluation being directly challenged by the National Rally.

So, I think they are attempting to expose moral evaluation strategies, move beyond them, and instead rely on authorization.

In Power or In Office? Leverage Without Government

Comparative research has often treated the Rassemblement National (RN) in France as a party on the cusp of governmental power, and Reform UK—despite its recent surge in influence—as an “outsider” shaping the agenda from the margins. Using the distinction between being “in power” and “in office,” how would you assess the current leverage of Le Pen and Farage over mainstream parties and policy in their respective systems?

Dr. Robert Butler: In France, the National Rally has not obtained an absolute majority in the Assembly. There was some discussion about waiting and only seeking to govern with a majority; that is how I understood the situation. There has also been discussion about whether there might be a primary across the right in French politics. However, certain parties further to the left within the right have indicated that they do not share common ground with the RN, the National Rally. So, in terms of being in office and in power, the RN is seeking new elections in order to try to secure that majority.

In the UK, various opinion polls have suggested that Reform UK would, if an election were called today—even though one is not due immediately—emerge as the largest party. It might not secure an overall majority, and this could result in a hung parliament. There is a portrayal of Reform UK as being on the outside, looking in at a UK that is collapsing or imploding, reflected in the slogan “Britain is broken” and in its emphasis on public services being unable to cope and being overwhelmed. In terms of being empowered in office, Reform UK is neither in office nor in power, but it is positioning itself around what is needed to take power. However, it is doing so very much from the outside, observing those in power and a situation that it portrays as collapsing and imploding.

When ‘Britain Is Broken’ Meets Economic Sovereignty

Your work highlights how crisis narratives are central to legitimization. How do far-right actors in France and the UK differently construct “crisis”—migration, cost of living, Europe, Islam, climate—and what does this tell us about the socio-economic and historical specificities of each case?

Dr. Robert Butler: Following on from what I’ve just said, I think that in the UK, Reform UK frames crisis in terms of systemic failure, emphasizing that Britain is broken. At his conference last year, Mr. Farage, for example, asked the audience, “Who has an NHS dentist in the room?” So, the crisis is constructed around the idea that Britain can no longer cope and that the system is under strain.

By contrast, from what I have followed with the National Rally in France, and from what I have observed in their speeches and interviews over the past few months, the situation is portrayed more as one in which France is seen as a system that needs to change—particularly a system of exchange in which goods are produced abroad rather than in France, and which must be reoriented to favor domestic production. Accordingly, crisis is increasingly framed as the need for barriers, especially to protect French goods and their quality. In an interview, Marine Le Pen refers to frontiers or borders as a means of protecting the quality of products coming into the country.

Populism as Process, Not Outcome

In recent years, French and British political language has seen an inflationary use of the term “populist” as a weapon of de-legitimation. Building on contributions in your volume that ask “who calls whom a populist?”, how has this labelling battle shaped the public perception and normalization of Le Pen’s RN and Farage-style projects?

Dr. Robert Butler: The term populism is better understood as a process—a means rather than an end in itself. I see it as a way of working toward a different political outcome in the future, rather than as an end product. Populism, in this sense, is not the outcome but the process. It is a process of placing more people on the side of “us” as opposed to “them,” where elites—frequently identified as such in interviews given by the National Rally—are positioned as “them,” and “the people” are increasingly placed on the side of “us,” meaning those who support these political parties.

I also think—and this is something I may not have mentioned earlier—that the concept of moral outrage plays an important role. This is another legitimization strategy identified more recently. An article published about five years ago by Rebecca Williams addresses moral outrage, and I think populism is closely linked to a certain degree of social outrage, where particular actions can be justified by expressions of disgust or dissatisfaction with the current situation.

In this sense, the term populism functions as a means of bringing people onto “our” side, presenting the United Kingdom and France as countries that need to do better, while simultaneously associating the nation and the people with the party. Populism, then, is a process of mobilizing support by drawing people in, rather than aligning them with the opposing side, which is constructed as those currently in power or other parties seeking power.

Moral Outrage, Media, and Knowledge Claims

Stop Trump Coalition march, Central London, United Kingdom, September 17, 2025. Protesters dressed as Musk, Farage, Vance, Putin, Trump, and Netanyahu. Photo: Ben Gingell.

You emphasize “epistemic vigilance” and post-truth conditions in contemporary politics. How do far-right entrepreneurs in France and the UK negotiate this environment—do they primarily undermine factual authority (“fake news,” “media system”), or do they also try to re-establish alternative epistemic authorities such as patriotic experts, “common sense,” or online influencers?

Dr. Robert Butler: I haven’t done much work on influencers as such; my focus has been more on YouTube as a social media outlet. I think certain media outlets have popularized the idea of common sense, and this notion has, in effect, become a form of legitimization—legitimizing actions when they can be framed as common sense. This is an area where more work needs to be done and further research is required.

With Reform UK, in particular, it is less about the issue of fake news and more about adding a certain level of moral outrage to claims that the NHS, the National Health Service, cannot cope, and that certain social mechanisms appear to be broken. In terms of common sense, I am not entirely sure; I think there is still much more work to be done on this notion, and further research is needed.

Mainstream Right Parties in a Reactive Phase

Looking at internal party dynamics, what similarities and differences do you see between the ways in which the French Republicans and the British Conservatives have responded discursively to the rise of the far right? Have their legitimization strategies tended to contain, converge with, or further empower RN and Reform-style actors?

Dr. Robert Butler: Thank you for your question. There has been some splintering of the traditional right in French politics toward the far right. In the UK, there have been several defections, mainly of former Conservative MPs, to Reform. There has been a noticeable number of such defections. I think there has been quite a lot of delegitimization of the policies of Reform UK and the National Rally by both the French Republicans and the British Conservatives.

Reform UK is often seen as having an alternative agenda, whereas the National Rally is perceived as having little or nothing in common with other mainstream political parties. That appears to be the prevailing view. In recent days, there was discussion, as I mentioned earlier, of a large primary ahead of the 2027 elections—either presidential, legislative, or both—but this seems to have been ruled out, suggesting that there is limited common ground with the RN, the National Rally.

Overall, there has been a strong emphasis on delegitimization. However, over time—perhaps over the next year or two—I expect we will see both the Conservatives and the Republican Party develop alternative legitimization strategies to justify their own positions. At present, they appear to be in a reactive phase in response to the rise and growing success of the RN and Reform UK.

From Negation to Affirmation

In your multimodal analysis of Farage and Reform UK, you show how negation and modality help define what a party “is” and “is not.” If we apply this lens to Le Pen/Bardella, how do denial, distancing, and disavowal (“not extreme right,” “not racist”) function in their efforts to render the RN a credible party of government?

Dr. Robert Butler: Again, my work has focused on Reform UK rather than on the RN, the National Rally. However, based on what I have observed, I think there is a growing emphasis on asserting what the party stands for. There appears to be less focus on defining what the RN is not, and more on clearly articulating what it represents. In a recent interview, Le Pen acknowledged that for around 30 years there had been considerable emphasis on the negative way the party was treated by the media and by other parties. I think there is now a shift toward emphasizing what the party stands for, rather than relying on negation—denying that it is this or that. There is a reason for this shift. 

The context is different from that of Reform UK, where Nigel Farage stepped back from mainstream politics for a period and then, over the last 12 to 18 months, had to explain why he was returning. This is why, in my recent article, I observed extensive use of negation by Farage, as he justified his return to mainstream politics by explaining what he could not do or why he rejected certain principles. 

By contrast, the situation is somewhat different for Le Pen and Bardella. They appear to be in a phase of asserting, through affirmative terms, what they actually stand for.

Re-Legitimizing Europe: Borders, Sovereignty, and Reform

Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella are seen at the conclusion of a political meeting for the Rassemblement National party in Marseille on March 3, 2024. Photo: Obatala-photography.

At the European level, how do you interpret the far right’s attempt to re-legitimize the EU not as a technocratic polity but as a vehicle for “civilizational” or “sovereigntist” politics? Do you see France and the UK as following parallel or diverging trajectories in this respect, given that one is inside and the other outside the Union?

Dr. Robert Butler: The notion of Frexit—France leaving the European Union—has been present in public debate over the last two or three years. More recently, the plight of farmers, allegedly linked to Mercosur, has become a topic of debate and is very much in the news in France this week. In contrast, the UK has focused more on controlling borders, particularly on who is coming into and going out of the country, and especially who is entering the UK. As a result, the European Union has become less of a direct feature in Reform UK’s discourse, with greater emphasis placed on fixing the UK’s infrastructure and protecting its borders. By contrast, the RN, the National Rally, appears more concerned with reforming the EU, first and foremost in ways that it argues would benefit France.

Your editorial work stresses the importance of multimodal critical discourse studies. How have social media formats—short clips, memes, influencer-style videos—transformed far-right communication in France and the UK, and are there noteworthy differences in platform use or visual rhetoric between Le Pen/Bardella and Farage/Tice?

Dr. Robert Butler: As I mentioned earlier, I haven’t focused specifically on the RN in my research, so it is difficult for me to provide a detailed answer with regard to the National Rally. However, if we take YouTube as an example, there are currently many clips of Mr. Farage commenting on the situation in the UK, for instance on immigration.

In some of his own clips, he also incorporates footage from other users’ videos to illustrate his points. This creates a kind of mise en abyme, if you like—a clip within a clip.

In several instances, the Union Jack flag is visible, either behind him in a car or on the screen, and there are also many clips of him seated at a desk. This produces a very formal, official setting, which again connects to the idea of being in power or in office—not actually holding office, but simulating a scenario in which one might be looking at a future leader in office.

By contrast, if we look at Marine Le Pen’s YouTube account—having discussed Farage’s account—you see many clips of her speaking in the Assemblée Nationale or being interviewed by mainstream media outlets. This is a key difference. There are many more clips of Le Pen in clearly official settings, such as major media interviews or parliamentary contexts. This points to a clear difference in the use of context.

From ‘Britain Is Broken’ to Paths to Power

Looking ahead to the next decade, what scenarios do you consider most plausible for the far right in France and the UK: full governmental incorporation, permanent “blackmail” power over center-right parties, or gradual demobilization as issues and generations change? What indicators should researchers monitor to distinguish among these trajectories?

Dr. Robert Butler: Thank you for asking this question, because one of the main slogans—or narratives—of Reform UK is “Britain is broken.” At some point, it will need fixing, and I think it is important to pay attention to metaphors related to rebuilding, fixing, and redoing. From a linguistic perspective, in addition to metaphors, we should also look for what are known as force-dynamic strategies, where interaction between entities involves overcoming difficulty and crisis, and observe whether these strategies are actually put into practice. In terms of language it will be particularly interesting in the UK to see how Britain is discursively framed as moving from being “broken” to being “fixed,” and how problems are presented as being overcome.

In France, the far right’s objective is to win the Assembly and secure a majority in 2027, as well as to win the presidential elections that year. It will also be important to observe the results of the municipal elections scheduled for 2026.

Focusing on the UK, a coalition involving Reform UK and another party—most likely the Conservatives, if it were to be any party—would probably be more attractive to Reform UK than holding an overall majority. We have a precedent for this in the Liberal Democrat–Conservative coalition from 2010 to 2015, in which the Liberal Democrats were the junior partner.

In that situation, the Conservatives were able to take advantage of certain Liberal Democrat policies, such as raising the tax threshold, while also seeking to maximize credit for the junior partner’s policy initiatives. At the same time, there was an abstention campaign for changes to the electoral system which was put forward. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats were largely left to deal with the fallout from the rise in tuition fees, which, as we can agree, was not a particularly popular policy.

If Reform UK were in a hung Parliament but emerged as the main coalition partner, it would be in a position to offload some responsibility for policy outcomes. Then, perhaps in ten years’ time, it could aim for full majority power.

Overall, I think we could see some very interesting political as well as discursive strategies. It is quite conceivable that Reform UK could be involved in a coalition arrangement similar to that of 2010, with both political and discursive strategies unfolding in parallel.

Legitimizing Authority Through Strategic Distancing

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.

Given your interest in how authority is discursively constructed, how do international crises—Russia’s war in Ukraine, the US democratic crisis, or Middle East conflicts—influence the legitimization strategies of far-right actors in France and the UK? Are these crises used mainly to normalize their positions, or also to distance themselves from more radical allies?

Dr. Robert Butler: I think that at conferences held by Farage last year, in 2024, there was some clear distancing from the leader of Russia. This distancing was definitely observable in the discourse.

In France, more recently this year, interviews with the RN have reflected an acknowledgement of US sovereignty in relation to what is unfolding there, alongside an emphasis that US priorities are not necessarily France’s priorities. This again represents a defense of France’s national interest. There also appears to be support for the rule of law.

I’m not sure I have much more to add to this question, but I think there is an acknowledgement of other countries combined with a certain degree of distancing, allowing both the UK and France to assert and defend their own national policies.

Trump, Europe, and the Politics of Non-Intervention

In light of the recently released Trump National Security Strategy, to what extent has the Trump presidency provided ideological validation or strategic inspiration for far-right actors in France and the UK? Do you see Le Pen, Bardella, or Farage consciously drawing on Trumpian rhetoric, political style, or governing practices, or is the transatlantic influence more diffuse and symbolic?

Dr. Robert Butler: From what I have observed, there appears to be some distancing from Trumpian rhetoric. Again, this reflects what I have noted previously. In France, the emphasis is very much on defending national interests at the level of the nation-state and on asserting France’s sovereignty. The RN, in particular, places strong emphasis on the rule of law. In the UK, the picture is perhaps more complex. There does seem to be some aversion to the language used in the US context, but I am not sure I have observed enough to comment on this in greater detail.

And lastly, Dr. Robert Butler, looking beyond national cases, do you see that the Trump presidency accelerates a broader European shift toward sovereigntist and civilization-based politics, or do European systems remain resilient and path-dependent? In other words, might Trump act as a multiplier for far-right normalization across the EU—or does his return instead provoke counter-mobilization among mainstream parties and institutions?

Dr. Robert Butler: Thank you for your question. I think it is difficult to know and much depends on what the remainder of the Trump presidency offers to European leaders. If European leaders are framed as weak and vulnerable—and we have seen some of this in recent discourse—and if they continue to be framed in this way, then there may be a tendency to seek protection, perhaps in exchange for greater influence or possibly reduced sovereignty. The notion of weakness in European leadership does appear to be entering Trumpian discourse at the moment. Again, the question is whether this framing is simply a moral label—a form of moral evaluation—where countries are described as weak. What does that actually mean, and is it backed up by substantive claims?

In terms of counter-mobilization, I think it depends on what, exactly, is being countered. If the discourse emphasizes non-intervention—leaving countries alone and withholding the financial, logistical, or other forms of support that may be required—then it becomes difficult to mobilize against any particular actor or policy.

The question then becomes how other countries—such as Russia, China, or other states—respond in relation to Europe. There is therefore a broader issue of whether non-intervention itself becomes a form of intervention. If one ceases to intervene, even rhetorically, and frames this as “leaving countries alone,” there is a risk that such a stance could weaken or undermine potential counter-mobilization.

Refugee children are helped ashore after arriving by boat from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, capturing a moment where relief and suffering coexist. Photo: Aleksandr Lutsenko.

The Humanity of Migration

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceHomeHuman RightsMigrationVoice of Youth

In this timely and powerful Voice of Youth (VoY) essay, Emmanouela Papapavlou reframes migration not as a crisis or threat, but as a defining human reality of the twenty-first century. Moving beyond populist slogans and fear-based rhetoric, the piece exposes the gap between political discourse and the lived experiences of migrants—marked by legal precarity, exclusion, and everyday vulnerability. It critically interrogates the selective use of “legality” in public debates and highlights how populism redirects anger away from power and toward the powerless. Importantly, the article identifies Generation Z as a potential counterforce, emphasizing its everyday engagement with diversity and its rejection of xenophobic narratives. Published on the occasion of International Migrants Day, the essay is a compelling call to restore dignity, humanity, and ethical responsibility to migration politics.

By Emmanouela Papapavlou*

In an age of global instability, migration is not an exception and not some marginal social phenomenon, it is a defining feature of the modern world. Wars, political persecution, economic collapse, environmental disasters and inequality push millions to leave their homes in search of safety, opportunity, and a sense of dignity. Within this reality, the 18th of December, International Migrants Day, is not just another “awareness day,” it is a powerful reminder that migration is one of the most central human experiences of the twenty-first century, and that the way we talk about it in public spaces has real consequences on real lives.

Despite its profoundly human dimension, migration has become one of the most polarized subjects in global politics. Populist rhetoric, flourishing across Europe, the United States, and beyond, finds in the “migrant” the perfect target, an “other” onto whom fears, insecurities, and imagined threats can be projected. Migrants are framed as a faceless mass, as an economic burden, as a cultural threat, or even as enemies of national security. Yet the reality of migration is dramatically different from these oversimplified narratives.

For millions, migration is not a choice, it is a necessity. And for those who manage to reach countries of arrival, the journey does not end, it begins. Access to legal documents, endless visa backlogs, the slow and often arbitrary asylum process, and the requirements for work authorization create a system that is frequently insurmountable. In the United States, for example, hundreds of thousands of people live for years without papers, not because they refuse to comply, but because the system is designed to delay, discourage, and exclude. Even proving that you qualify for asylum often requires documents that no one could possibly rescue while fleeing a bombed home or a collapsing life.

While political discourse focuses obsessively on “flows” and “invasions,” what almost never gets discussed is the actual everyday reality of migrants, the labor exploitation, the lack of access to healthcare or education, the constant uncertainty of “will I be allowed to stay tomorrow,” the threat of deportation, the social stigma, the ghettoization, the absence of meaningful integration. Many states treat migration as a problem that must be “controlled,” not as a social fact that must be understood, integrated, and addressed with humanity.

International Migrants Day exists precisely because of this gap, the gap between rhetoric and reality, between what is said and what people live. It is a day dedicated to rights and dignity, to the fundamental right to move and to the right to live without fear. It is also a reminder that societies do not show their humanity in how they treat the powerful, but in how they treat the vulnerable.

Here we see another dimension of populism, the selective invocation of “legality.” Public debate suddenly fills with people who appear deeply committed to the rule of law when the conversation turns to migrants. “They came illegally,” they say, as if respect for the law were a consistent personal value and not something invoked only when convenient. Because the same people who express moral outrage at a refugee are often the same people who consider underage drinking normal, who speed on the highway, who drive under the influence, who use recreational substances, who pirate movies, music, and games without a second thought. In those cases, the law becomes a “technicality,” and strictness evaporates.

Yet when the “offender” is someone who ran from war, when it is a mother holding a child in a boat, when it is a young person who left everything behind just to survive, then suddenly the law becomes absolute and unforgiving. And even worse, we almost never see the same outrage when the offenders are powerful, corrupt politicians who steal public funds, evade taxes, exploit systems for personal gain, or embezzle compensations. In those situations, anger disappears. Outrage fades. “Illegality” becomes almost invisible.

This contradiction has nothing to do with the law. It has everything to do with control, with fear, and with the political function of populism, which is to divert collective anger away from those who cause injustice, and direct it instead toward those who are least able to defend themselves.

Yet within this landscape, there is a source of hope, and it comes from Generation Z. Gen Z is the first generation in history to grow up fully online, exposed every day to the lives of people across the world, from every background and every context. Diversity is not perceived as a threat; it is an intrinsic part of reality. For this generation, multiculturalism is not an ideological position, it is the texture of daily life in schools, universities, neighborhoods, and digital spaces.

Young people do not see migrants as outsiders, they are classmates, friends, coworkers, neighbors. They are the stories shared on social media, the voices heard without intermediaries, the people facing the same universal anxieties, work, education, safety, rights. Take the example of someone like Zohran Mamdani, who arrived in the United States as a child refugee and eventually became an elected representative in New York. His story is not an exception, it is a sign of a new era in which identity is shaped not by where you were born, but by who you are and what you contribute to your community.

What becomes clear is that Gen Z, through everyday contact with diverse cultures and people, rejects fear based rhetoric. They are not easily persuaded by politicians who weaponize xenophobia, and they do not accept narratives of “threat” without question. They see migration as a human reality, not as a tool for propaganda. And this generational shift carries enormous political weight for the future.

If we truly want to honor International Migrants Day, it is not enough to acknowledge its existence. We must promote policies that allow for safe, legal, and humane migration, support integration programs that go beyond survival and lead to participation and dignity, reform asylum and legalization systems so they do not trap people in bureaucratic limbo, and build societies that recognize diversity not as a danger but as a collective strength.

Because at the end of the day, the question we must ask is simple, and its simplicity is what makes it so revealing: How can a human being be considered “illegal” on an earth we were all born into? How can anyone be treated as worthless simply because they were born a few kilometers away?

If we cannot answer that clearly, then perhaps International Migrants Day exists to remind us that before borders, politics, and identities, we are, above all, human.

(*) Emmanouela Papapavlou is a high school student from Thessaloniki, Greece, deeply passionate about social and political issues. She has actively participated in Model United Nations and other youth forums, serving as a chairperson in multiple conferences and winning awards in Greek debate competitions. Writing is her greatest passion, and she loves using it to explore democracy, civic engagement, and human rights. Her dream is to share her ideas, inspire action, and amplify the voices of young people who want to make a difference. Email: emmanpapapavlou@gmail.com