In this Voice of Youth (VoY) commentary, Emmanouela Papapavlou reflects on the wave of student protests sweeping France and asks what lies beneath the barricades, tear gas, and confrontations with police. She argues that the unrest should not be reduced to disorder alone but understood as the expression of accumulated frustration with teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating school conditions, academic pressure, and a growing sense that institutions listen only when young people make themselves impossible to ignore. Without excusing violence, Papapavlou calls for attention to the grievances that precede it. Her central warning is stark: when a generation is repeatedly told to wait while its future feels increasingly insecure, frustration can become political anger—and democratic institutions risk teaching young people that being heard requires escalation.
By Emmanouela Papapavlou*
There is something deeply unsettling about watching a seventeen-year-old stand in front of a line of riot police. Not because young people are incapable of anger. But because we have somehow become so accustomed to ignoring them that we only seem to notice them once they are standing in the streets.
And the images are difficult to look away from. Students running through clouds of tear gas. Police in riot gear standing opposite teenagers. Barricades burning in the streets. Arrests. Injuries. A fifteen-year-old boy losing his hand during a confrontation involving a police grenade. And suddenly, everyone has an opinion: Some say the students have gone too far. Some say the police have gone too far. Some blame political parties. Some blame immigrants. Some blame the far left. Some blame the government. Some blame the students themselves.
But somewhere between all the shouting, the actual question is being lost. Why are these students so angry in the first place? Because this is not really about one protest. It is not really about one school. And it is not really about one government decision. It is about what happens when young people spend years being told that education is the key to their future, only to enter an education system that increasingly feels incapable of giving them one. They sit in overcrowded classrooms. They wait for teachers who never arrive. They study in buildings that have been allowed to deteriorate. They carry schedules that leave them exhausted. They face constant academic pressure and an increasingly competitive path toward university. And then they are told to work harder. To be patient. To understand. To wait… But how long are young people supposed to wait before frustration becomes anger?
When Patience Turns Into Anger
France’s education ministry found that almost one in ten teaching hours in public secondary schools went untaught during the 2024–2025 school year, with a significant proportion lost because replacement teachers could not be found. Students have repeatedly pointed to teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, poor infrastructure and the pressure surrounding university admissions as reasons for taking to the streets. And maybe the most painful part is that none of this is new. That is what makes it worse. The students are not discovering that their system is imperfect. They are discovering that the adults who have known it was imperfect for years have still allowed it to remain that way. And that changes everything.
Because there is a difference between being failed once and being failed repeatedly. There is a difference between hearing that something will be fixed and watching nothing change. There is a difference between being told that your voice matters and being listened to only after you start shouting. That is what I think we are watching in France. Not simply a student protest. But a generation reaching the point where patience no longer feels like virtue. It feels like surrender. And when that happens, the question is no longer why are they protesting? The question becomes: Why did they have to protest to be heard?
The Fire Is Not the Beginning
Of course, not everything happening in the streets is justified. Burning schools does not repair schools. Throwing objects at police officers does not make education better. Violence against teachers, students or police officers cannot be excused simply because the cause behind a protest is legitimate. But we should be equally careful not to make the opposite mistake.
Because once violence appears, it becomes very easy to stop asking why the protest began. It becomes easy to look at the flames instead of what started the fire. And it becomes even easier to look at a teenager throwing a bottle and forget that there is a teenager underneath it who may have spent years feeling that nobody was listening. That does not excuse violence. It explains why understanding the cause matters. Because, if all we do is extinguish the fire, without asking why the building keeps catching fire, we will eventually be standing in the same place again.
When Institutions Hear Only Shouting
The French government has promised dialogue and changes, including a review of the university admissions system and measures addressing school conditions. But the response has also been dominated by policing, political accusations and arguments over who is responsible for the violence. On October 7, the government temporarily suspended the use of stun grenades at student protests after the Lens incident, while investigations into police conduct continue.
And perhaps that is the tragedy. A generation is asking to be taken seriously. And the country is arguing about how loudly they asked. But students should not have to become perfectly behaved victims before their problems become worthy of attention. They should not have to be injured before we ask what they were protesting. They should not have to fill the streets before we look inside their classrooms. They should not have to become a national crisis before we remember that they are the people who will inherit the country we are building now.
A Generation Asking to Be Seen
Because education was never supposed to be about simply surviving. It was supposed to be about becoming. Becoming educated. Becoming independent. Becoming capable of thinking for ourselves. Becoming the people who will eventually decide what kind of society we live in.
So, what are we teaching them now? Are we teaching them that institutions listen? Or are we teaching them that institutions listen only when they are forced to? Are we teaching them that democracy gives them a voice? Or are we teaching them that their voice matters only when it becomes impossible to ignore? Are we teaching them that their future belongs to them? Or are we quietly asking them to accept a future that we have failed to build?
Because young people are watching. They are watching their schools deteriorate. They are watching their teachers disappear. They are watching their parents’ struggle. They are watching politicians argue. They are watching institutions promise. And they are watching nothing change.
And eventually, something inside a person breaks when they realize that the people responsible for protecting their future have become more comfortable with the problem than they are. That is why this is bigger than France. Because every generation eventually reaches a moment when it looks at the world it has inherited and asks: Is this really all you have prepared for us? And if the answer is yes, then perhaps we should not be surprised when they refuse to accept it.
They Are Not the Future—They Are Here
The students of France are not simply asking for better classrooms. They are asking for proof that their future matters. They are asking to be respected. To be heard. To be considered. And maybe, more than anything, they are asking the adults around them to remember something that should never have needed reminding: They are not the future. They are the present. They are already here. They are already watching. They are already speaking.
And if we continue to ignore them, they will only have one thing left to do. To speak louder. So, listen carefully. Because beneath the shouting, beneath the sirens, beneath the tear gas and the barricades, there is a generation trying to tell us something. They are tired of being told to wait. They are tired of being told that change takes time. They are tired of being told that their concerns are complicated, that the budget is difficult, that reform is coming, that someone is working on it. They have heard enough promises. They want to see change.
And perhaps that is why the streets are burning. Not because young people have suddenly become violent. But because their frustration has been allowed to burn for far too long. The question now is not whether the fire can be put out. The question is whether anyone is finally willing to ask why it started.
Because the students are saying: We are catching fire, and if we burn, you burn with us.
(*) 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
In this ECPS Voice of Youth (VoY) interview, Dr. Amedeo Varriale reflects on the study of populism, the responsibilities of scholars, and the boundaries between public engagement and political activism. Working primarily within the ideational tradition, he stresses conceptual clarity, methodological pluralism, and intellectual humility, arguing that “there is not necessarily one correct answer” in populism research. Dr. Varriale maintains that scholars should contribute to public debate through empirical evidence, theoretical transparency, scientific rigor, and procedural validity while resisting political advocacy. He also emphasizes the need to acknowledge uncertainty, present competing interpretations fairly, and remain transparent about research limitations. Ultimately, scholarship should inform democratic debate without attempting to determine its political outcome or replace citizens’ own electoral choices.
As part of the ECPS Youth Program’s Voice of Youth (VoY) interview series, Dr. Amedeo Varrialereflects on the intellectual, methodological, and ethical challenges confronting a new generation of scholars studying populism. A political scientist specializing in populism, the radical right, and contemporary European politics, Dr. Varriale traces his research interests to the political transformations that followed the 2015 refugee crisis, Donald Trump’s 2016 election, and Italy’s 2018 League–Five Star Movement coalition. His work subsequently developed around questions of how populism should be conceptualized, measured, and distinguished from more explicitly authoritarian and anti-democratic phenomena.
A central theme running through the interview is the importance of intellectual openness in a field characterized by competing definitions and methodological traditions. Although Dr. Varriale works primarily within the ideational approach associated with Cas Mudde, he emphasizes that populism studies contain legitimate theoretical disagreements. For him, scholars should resist the temptation to transform conceptual preferences into unquestionable certainties: “There is not necessarily one correct answer.” Instead, they should “recognize ambiguity and avoid presenting one interpretation of populism as an absolute truth.” His broader methodological principle is correspondingly straightforward: “The most important thing is to keep an open mind when approaching political science.”
This commitment to scholarly pluralism is closely connected to Dr. Varriale’s understanding of the public role of academics. He argues that “scholars have some responsibility to intervene in public discussions,” particularly because research on politics, society, and democratic life can produce consequences extending far beyond universities. Yet public engagement, in his view, requires clearly defined boundaries. “I am skeptical of academic activism,” he stresses, adding that “engaging with the public should not turn into political advocacy or activism.” Instead, academics should contribute “empirical evidence, theoretical transparency, scientific rigor, and procedural validity,” while maintaining sufficient humility to acknowledge that scholarship remains fallible and that research findings “cannot be treated as absolute truths.”
Dr. Varriale extends this principle to democratic decision-making itself. Scholarship, he argues, can clarify the opportunities and risks associated with populism, distinguish democratic protest from challenges to democratic norms, and communicate evidence to journalists, policymakers, educators, and civil society. But its democratic function should remain informational rather than prescriptive: “Scholars can provide evidence to society, but democratic societies and the demos ultimately make their own political and electoral decisions.” Academia, he concludes, should “facilitate democratic debate without attempting to determine its outcome.”
Across discussions of populism, authoritarianism, digital methods, early-career research, and public engagement, the interview therefore presents scholarly rigor, conceptual humility, and openness to competing interpretations as essential foundations for politically relevant—but politically independent—research.
The interview with Dr. Amedeo Varriale is lightly edited to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
From the Refugee Crisis to the Study of Populism
Refugees arriving by inflatable dinghy boats remain in camps on the island of Lesvos, Greece, on October 5, 2015. Photo: Anjo Kan.
Please introduce yourself, outline your academic journey, and explain how your research interests developed. Why do you believe your area of research is particularly significant in today’s global environment?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: I am a politics graduate of the University of East London, and I completed my PhD in 2024. I am currently a non-resident research fellow at the European Center for Populism Studies, and I am also a research fellow at a center focused on the study of the radical right and populism.
My interest in populism developed over several years. There were three major events between 2015 and 2018 that particularly shaped my research interests: the refugee crisis in 2015, Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and Italy’s 2018 coalition between the League and the Five Star Movement.
The refugee crisis was particularly significant because it created a major divide in public opinion and between political parties, with some advocating for greater openness towards immigration and others strongly opposing it. This contributed to the rise of populist and nationalist parties, particularly on the right.
Trump’s election in 2016 was another important moment. It attracted enormous international attention because the United States, as the leading country of the liberal democratic world, had elected a president whose political language was very different from the traditional language of liberal democracy.
The third event was the most important for me personally. In 2018, for the first time, a key EU member state, Italy, had a government coalition led by fully Eurosceptic populist forces from the right and left: the League and the Five Star Movement.
I eventually studied this coalition during my PhD. I became increasingly interested in understanding what populism was and how it functioned ideologically and rhetorically, particularly because it appeared to me as something very different from mainstream consensus politics on the center-right and center-left.
I believe studying populism today is extremely important. Approximately half of EU member states have a populist party either in government or as the largest opposition party, and this is only within Europe. There are many more populist parties and leaders around the world.
Populism can have a significant impact on political systems. When populists come to power, they do not necessarily abolish democracy altogether, but they can significantly alter democratic institutions. They can erode checks and balances, the rule of law, and minority rights. If we want to understand how liberal democracy is affected, we need to understand why, how, and by whom it is challenged.
Defining Populism Through the Ideational Approach
Do you have your own definition of populism that you use in your research? And do you have a particular conceptual approach that you use? And has your understanding and your definition of populism changed throughout the trajectory of your research?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: I primarily adhere to the ideational school of thought. I am a big fan of the ideational approach to the study of populism, particularly as conceptualized by the prominent Dutch scholar Cas Mudde.
In my PhD thesis, I used Mudde’s definition of populism. Essentially, populism is an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: the pure people versus the corrupt elite. It argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale, or the general will of the people.
There are three reasons why I think this is a particularly useful approach.
First, it allows us to distinguish between populism and non-populism and therefore establishes relatively clear boundaries. There are two opposites to populism: elitism and pluralism.
Secondly, Mudde’s definition allows for cross-national and cross-regional applicability. There will always be populists to study around the world because anti-elitism and anti-pluralism are recurring features on both sides of the political spectrum.
Third, the ideational approach has a certain versatility. It can be applied at different levels of analysis, including qualitative studies at the mass level. Observing or measuring anti-elitism and people-centrism is possible not only when studying party leaders, but also when studying citizens.
The only aspect of the ideational approach that I am not completely convinced by is Mudde’s argument that populism is thin centered. Unlike thick ideologies such as liberalism, socialism, and communism, populism supposedly offers relatively few specific views on political, institutional, or socioeconomic issues.
I personally believe that populists do share a number of common views. They tend to support a strong majoritarian popular mandate, strong executive power, limitations on the privileges of politicians, and direct democracy. On socioeconomic issues, they can support welfare chauvinism, lower taxation for small and medium-sized businesses, and less or no immigration.
So, I believe populism has a Weltanschauung. While anti-elitism and people-centrism may be its core characteristics, as I argued in my PhD thesis, it also has other important characteristics, such as sovereignism, producerism, reformism, and direct democracy.
My understanding of populism has not radically changed throughout my research. However, I would say that I am now slightly more open to the idea that populism can be thin-centered in some cases.
Populism, Fascism, and the Importance of Conceptual Boundaries
AfD demo with slogan Stop Islamization and counter demonstration of the Left in Luetten Klein in Rostock, Germany on May 14, 2018. AfD, Alternative for Germany, is a right wing political party in Germany. Photo: Shutterstock.
Are there any theoretical debates that you have considered most consequential for the future of the field of populism studies? And what kind of misconceptions do you frequently encounter, both in and out of academia when doing your research?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: One important debate for the future of populism studies may be whether different approaches can eventually be brought together. Rather than asking whether populism is an ideology, strategy, discourse, or style, scholars may increasingly examine how ideas, political agency, discourse and performance, institutions, and citizen reception interact to create populist politics or populist societies. Perhaps in the future, these different approaches can be complementary rather than mutually exclusive. That is, however, speculation.
Regarding misconceptions, I would say there is a recurring blurring of boundaries between populism and fascism, or between populist radical-right actors and the extreme right. This is particularly common in political journalism, but it also occurs to a lesser degree in academia. It is important to distinguish between populist radical-right actors, who are illiberal but not necessarily anti-democratic, and neo-fascist extreme-right actors, who are both illiberal and anti-democratic.
Populism is reformist. It is not revolutionary. It is anti-establishment rather than anti-system. Once it ceases to be anti-establishment and becomes genuinely anti-system, it starts to become something else and potentially something much more authoritarian.
Populists can be skeptical of or opposed to the rule of law and minority rights, but they generally believe in popular sovereignty and electoral democracy. They do not necessarily believe in liberal democracy.
The Italian scholar Marco Tarchi, for example, distinguishes populists and fascists based on their views of the state, markets, sovereignty, the nation, and other important political questions. We therefore need to be careful not to conflate the two.
Measuring Populism Across Different Contexts
Every research agenda can encounter conceptual and methodological challenges. How do you operationalize and how do you measure populism in your own work? Particularly when comparing different systems, different contexts, or different countries, different case studies. So, how can you balance qualitative and quantitative approaches when doing your research?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: Many scholars have developed different ways of measuring populism. For example, Pippa Norris with her Global Party Survey, Kirk Hawkins, Akkerman, Mudde and Zaslove, Kurt Weyland, and many others. Personally, I usually observe and interpret populism through qualitative methods, sometimes comparing one case to another. I use party manifestos, thematic content analysis, and discourse analysis.
During my PhD, however, I developed a methodology to measure the ideological populism of two Italian parties. I identified six populist themes from the literature: anti-elitism, people-centrism, sovereignism, reformism, producerism, and direct democracy. I identified these themes in interviews with politicians and in party manifestos. My method also had a quantitative component because I counted the occurrence of these themes to assess the degree of populism.
I used a gradational approach inspired by Charles Ragin’s fuzzy-set methodology. The values were 0, 0.3, 0.7, and 1, corresponding to not populist, barely populist, considerably populist, and full-blown populist. If none of the themes were present, the result was not populist. One or two themes meant barely populist, three or four meant considerably populist, and five or six meant full-blown populist.
I interviewed ten political figures, five from each party. The themes occurred consistently in the interviews, and the manifesto analysis resulted in the Italian parties being classified as full-blown populist.
I have not, however, measured populism in a strict sense across different countries, political systems, and historical contexts. In most of my work, I have analyzed and interpreted it qualitatively.
I think qualitative and quantitative approaches work best in a complementary way. Quantitative approaches can identify broad patterns across different historical and geographical contexts, while qualitative research can explain the significance, mechanisms, and context behind those patterns.
The Digital Transformation of Populism Research
The study of populism increasingly relies on digital data, social media, and computational methods. What role have these tools played in your own research, and how have they transformed the way scholars investigate contemporary political phenomena?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: In my own research, computational methods and software have essentially played no role so far. I was once a research assistant working on a book where I helped identify themes. Other researchers subsequently used NVivo to locate these themes in tweets, but I was not directly involved in that part. These tools have nevertheless transformed populism studies. Researchers can now examine political communication on a much larger scale and almost instantaneously. They can analyze thousands or millions of posts on platforms such as X, Truth Social, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as online engagement and digital networks. This makes it possible to identify populist themes such as anti-elitism, appeals to the nation, and other forms of political discourse.
Text mining and sentiment analysis can also help researchers measure political discourse and understand relationships between party leaders, parliamentarians, citizens, grassroots activists, and journalists. These tools are particularly useful during major events such as political crises and election campaigns.
There are, however, limitations. Algorithms can contain biases, and social-media users are not necessarily representative of the population or electorate as a whole. There are also ethical and privacy concerns surrounding online data, which can affect research funding or institutional approval, particularly for PhD and postdoctoral research.
Right-Wing and Left-Wing Populism in Italy
Supporters of Five Stars Movement in Naples rally with Italian flag and political symbol of the movement in Napoli, Campania, Italy on May 30, 2018. Photo: Antonio Balasco.
Research can often produce unexpected discoveries. What has been the most surprising finding in your work? Have you encountered evidence that fundamentally challenged your original assumptions or redirected your research idea?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: During my PhD fieldwork, when I interviewed politicians from the League and the Five Star Movement, I was struck by an interesting difference between right-wing and left-wing populism in Italy. The two parties had a similar overall agenda because of their anti-elitist populism, but their Euroscepticism was different.
The Italian populist right criticized Europe and wanted a Europe that did less but better. They envisioned a Europe that would gradually return to something closer to its pre-Maastricht status.
The Italian populist left criticized Europe from a different perspective. Their Euroscepticism was based more on the idea that the EU should do more but better, particularly regarding fiscal and environmental policy integration.
Overall, both populist right-wing and left-wing actors tended to favor reforming the EU from within rather than leaving it altogether.
The left’s Euroscepticism was aimed more at international corporate elites because of their economic power and influence over sovereign states. Right-wing Euroscepticism was aimed more at national and international liberal-progressive elites because of their positions on immigration, globalization, and popular sovereignty.
Of course, there are also areas where right and left populism overlap. I would not say these findings fundamentally challenged my original assumptions or redirected my research agenda, but they did reveal some interesting differences between right- and left-wing populism.
Conducting Research in Polarized Political Environments
Populism can frequently involve politically polarized environments, disinformation campaigns, and contested narratives. Have these dynamics affected your ability to collect data, access reliable sources or to conduct objective research? And how do you navigate politically sensitive topics while maintaining scholarly rigor?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: I would not say these dynamics have significantly affected my ability to collect data, access reliable sources, or conduct objective research. However, they can certainly make research on populism more daunting.
Accessibility, accuracy, and reliability can be influenced by polarization, disinformation, and competing narratives. The best way for scholars to address this is to distinguish between sources that provide verifiable evidence, those that provide political or scholarly opinions, and subjective or partisan journalism.
Whenever possible, researchers should collect their own data through fieldwork. If that is not possible, primary sources, peer-reviewed academic sources, and respected independent organizations can be useful. Using multiple sources and avoiding a predetermined ideological perspective can increase the objectivity and reliability of research.
In populism studies, it is also normal to encounter different approaches and conclusions. There are competing ideational, sociocultural, and political-strategic approaches to populism.
There is not necessarily one correct answer. Scholars need to recognize ambiguity and avoid presenting one interpretation of populism as an absolute truth. The most important thing is to keep an open mind when approaching political science.
Research Beyond Academic Publication
Looking beyond academic publication, what impact would you ideally like your research to have? How can scholarly work contribute to addressing democratic challenges associated with populism while avoiding becoming politicized itself?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: Scholars have some responsibility to intervene in public discussions. Research often deals with questions concerning society and democratic life, and those findings can have real-life consequences for communities.
That said, I am skeptical of academic activism. Engaging with the public should not turn into political advocacy or activism. Academics should try to be as objective as possible and contribute empirical evidence, theoretical transparency, scientific rigor, and procedural validity. They should also have the humility to recognize that their research is not flawless and that findings cannot be treated as absolute truths.
Communicating academic findings to the public, policymakers, politicians, and journalists can be difficult. Academic language needs to be simplified for wider audiences and made reader friendly. Findings should also be summarized clearly and concisely, particularly for journalists and policymakers. There should be concrete examples, and unnecessary jargon should be avoided. Finally, academics should be transparent about the limitations and weaknesses of their research frameworks and methodology.
The Importance of Academic Networks
So, I’m going to shift gears a little bit for my next question. And I would like to ask you about international collaboration. Because contemporary research increasingly involves collaboration with other researchers, how has cooperation with other scholars, with other academic networks and initiatives, such as the ECPS Early Career Researchers Network, influenced your research, your professional development, and your intellectual outlook?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: I have not directly used the ECPS Early Career Researchers Network yet, but I have had the opportunity to write and publish different articles with ECPS. Earlier this year, I participated in the ECPS Virtual Workshop Series, We, the People and the Future of Democracy: An Interdisciplinary Approach. I served as a discussant for several sessions and as a moderator or chair for one. These workshops gave me the opportunity to engage with scholars who are more experienced than me, and I learned a great deal simply by listening to them. Preparing to act as a discussant also expanded my knowledge and research skills because I had to engage closely with other scholars’ work and prepare meaningful discussion points.
I also participated in a workshop on the New Right in Copenhagen, where I presented research on Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
These experiences allowed me to meet people with similar interests and career objectives. Although I have not yet co-authored anything through these networks, I now have professional contacts and people I can approach for opinions, advice, or potential academic collaboration. I also really value meeting people from different countries, age groups, and areas of expertise.
The Role of Research in Democratic Decision-Making
Israelis protest in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu’s Judicial Coup in Israel. Photo: Avivi Aharon.
What impact would you ideally like your research to have? How could scholarly work contribute to addressing democratic challenges associated with populism while avoiding becoming politicized itself?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: Looking beyond academic publication, I would like my research to contribute by better informing the public about the opportunities and threats associated with populism. I would like citizens to understand what they are likely to get in terms of policymaking and institutional reforms when they vote for a populist party or leader.
I think it is a moral duty to explain how populism affects liberal democracy, not only in terms of institutions but also political representation and public debate. Once citizens are informed, however, they should be left alone to decide who they want to vote for.
Research can also be useful to journalists, educators, policymakers, and civil society organizations. It can help these groups distinguish between legitimate and spontaneous forms of democratic protest and more serious challenges to democratic norms. It can also identify ways democratic institutions can respond to those challenges while addressing everyday concerns without abandoning the rule of law and political pluralism.
To avoid excessive politicization, I think scholarship should do four things: use methodology transparently; present competing interpretations fairly; acknowledge uncertainty and new evidence that contradicts one’s own argument; and be honest about the limitations and weaknesses of research.
Scholars can provide evidence to society, but democratic societies and the demos ultimately make their own political and electoral decisions. If academics dislike populists, that does not mean they should demonize citizens who support them. Academia should facilitate democratic debate without attempting to determine its outcome.
Challenges Facing Early-Career Researchers
Next, I would like to talk about career obstacles. What has been the greatest personal or professional challenge that you may have faced? Particularly as an early career scholar, and what has enabled you to overcome these obstacles?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: One of the biggest challenges during my PhD was having to restructure and rewrite a large part of my thesis. Fortunately, I managed to do so successfully, and I was actually happier with the second version of my thesis than the original. My examiners gave me valuable feedback, particularly on how to connect my theoretical framework to the existing literature.
Another challenge has been finding the right postdoctoral position. Populism studies is a very niche subfield of political science, so there are not as many postdoctoral positions as one might expect, and the ones that are available are extremely competitive. This can be particularly challenging for someone who cannot relocate anywhere in the world for personal reasons.
It can be frustrating, but it is important not to give in to that frustration. Continue studying, continue reading other people’s work, continue publishing, get up early every morning, and keep trying.
The Rewards of Academic Research
I want to ask you about what has felt rewarding in your research journey, but also if there is anything that you would have approached differently.
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: The most rewarding aspect has undoubtedly been being published and seeing a well-presented, well-written, and aesthetically pleasing article with my name on it published in an important journal or magazine. This makes me proud, but it also makes my parents, friends, family, and partner proud.
A couple of weeks ago, I received a hard copy of a policy journal containing one of my articles, and it was a very fulfilling experience. It made me realize that all the hard work had served a purpose and, in a complex and not immediately noticeable way, contributed to knowledge.
The pursuit of truth is a noble aim. It is also rewarding to contribute to common knowledge and, indirectly, to society, by producing in-depth work that helps explain how political systems function.
Intellectual Influences on the Study of Populism
Are there any particular scholars, books, experiences, or even unexpected sources of inspiration that have fundamentally shaped your thinking and your research?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: Certainly. I have several favorite authors and books that have contributed to my intellectual development. When I first started studying populism at a higher level during my PhD, I encountered the work of Cas Mudde and many other scholars who examined populism primarily from an ideological and qualitative perspective. I would particularly recommend Mudde’s books to young scholars entering the field. His writing is conceptually sophisticated without being unnecessarily difficult to understand.
I would also recommend the British scholar Paul Taggart and his seminal book Populism, which helped me understand the origins of populism, including its development in the late nineteenth-century United States with the People’s Party and in Russia with the Narodniks.
I am also a great admirer of Marco Tarchi because he comparatively analyses populism and the fascist extreme right.
Another scholar I would recommend is Benjamin Moffitt. His book Populism examines similarities and differences between populism and other ideologies, including liberalism, socialism, and nationalism.
These scholars have been fundamental to my intellectual development, and I think it is difficult to study populism without becoming familiar with their work.
Advice for the Next Generation of Political Scientists
If there are any skills that you believe young political scientists need in order to thrive. And what advice do you offer to the next generation of scholars entering the field, especially regarding to the fact that universities are becoming increasingly internationalized, and research has become more competitive than it has ever been before?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: I think computational methods and the ability to work with large amounts of digital data are increasingly important. Learning how to use tools such as NVivo and RStudio, as well as platforms such as MTurk, can be valuable. I myself need to develop these skills further.
Another important skill is teaching experience. It is useful to gain teaching experience early, preferably during the PhD, because it can make a significant difference to your CV and can be valuable when universities are hiring postdoctoral researchers.
But the most important piece of advice I can give is very simple: read, read, and read. Read academic books, political journalism, history, sociology, and even things that are completely unrelated to your research, such as novels and classical literature. Reading widely allows you to develop intellectual connections beyond your immediate field.
Ultimately, an academic needs to be well-read.
The Future of Populism Studies
Populism and political marketing: An illustration of how populist rhetoric is often employed as a strategic tool to swiftly gain voter support. Illustration: Jakub Jirsak.
Looking ahead, where do you see populism studies evolving over the next decade? Which research questions or neglected areas deserve far greater scholarly attention than they currently receive?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: I think it is reasonable to speculate that populism studies may become increasingly connected with research on authoritarianism. Populism is often described as democratic or even hyper-democratic to the point of becoming illiberal. We have seen populists moderate themselves after entering government, but we have also seen political actors that began as populists evolve into something different.
I am thinking particularly about developments such as Donald Trump’s second term, the AfD, and National Future in Italy, which have advanced policies that are considerably more radical or extreme than those of many populists of ten or twenty years ago.
One example is remigration. This concept does not simply refer to returning illegal immigrants. It can also involve legal immigrants and second-generation citizens who are considered insufficiently integrated. That goes beyond populism and raises questions about authoritarianism and democratic norms.
I therefore think future research should examine more carefully where the boundary lies between populism and extreme-right authoritarianism, particularly in terms of policymaking. This area has been somewhat neglected. Academia has not always provided clear ideational distinctions between neo-populism, neo-fascism, and reactionary right-wing authoritarianism. Scholars such as Marco Tarchi and Robert Paxton have made important contributions to distinguishing these concepts, although in different contexts.
Sometimes parties are described as populist when they are actually neo-fascist or extreme right. In those cases, calling them populist can obscure important distinctions. The opposite can also happen. I think we should try to call political phenomena by their appropriate names. Of course, this can be difficult in political science, and particularly in political journalism, where terminology is often used inconsistently.
A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Populist Parties
If resources, time, and institutional constraints were no obstacle for you, what research project would you most like to pursue? More broadly, what do you hope will ultimately be the lasting contribution of your work to both scholarship and to public understanding?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: If time and resources allowed me, I would like to undertake a large-scale project with the ultimate aim of developing a taxonomy of populist parties based on their relationship with liberal democracy, their conceptualization of anti-elitism, and their views on important aspects of the political system, including the state, economy, and markets.
This has been done before to some extent. Margaret Canovan conducted similar work in the 1980s and 1990s, and Mudde did something similar in his 2007 book Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. However, these classifications are now somewhat outdated.
There may therefore be a gap in the literature for a new taxonomy. If I pursue a postdoctoral project in the future, this is likely to be the kind of proposal I would put forward.
I would like to use interviews as a primary methodology, as I did during my PhD, and speak with populist leaders in countries such as Argentina, Britain, Italy, and Poland, potentially expanding the research beyond Europe.
I also think it would be useful to move beyond the simple division between right-wing and left-wing populism. There are different subgroups, including neoliberal or centrist populists on the right and different varieties of socialist populism on the left. Right and left can be treated as broad categories, but there are more detailed distinctions between populists in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Americas in terms of their beliefs and overall worldviews.
I would hope that developing these kinds of distinctions could become one of the lasting contributions of my research, alongside my work distinguishing between neo-populism and neo-fascism.
The public also needs to understand that populism is not necessarily undemocratic or anti-democratic. It can give a voice to silent majorities or minorities in political systems that are authoritarian or competitively authoritarian.
At the same time, populism can obstruct the rule of law and minority rights in liberal democracies. It can therefore have different effects depending on the political context.
More research needs to be produced and communicated not only within academic circles but also through the media, which plays an important role in shaping public narratives. People need to understand the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of populism.
If I could write a book that brought together all of these aspects, I think that would be a lasting contribution that I would be proud of for many years.
In this inaugural interview of the ECPS Youth Program’s new interview series, ECPS-ECRN member Andrei Gheorghe discusses his comparative research on populism, illiberalism, and nationalism in Romania and Hungary. He conceptualizes populism through the construction of “the people,” examining how populist actors define belonging, exclusion, and collective identity. Gheorghe highlights the contrast between Hungary’s historically rooted nationalist discourse and Romania’s comparatively understudied populist politics, arguing that “national populism in Romania is very poorly studied and researched.” He also reflects on the challenges facing early-career scholars, including limited funding, differing academic traditions, and the importance of international scholarly networks. For Gheorghe, populism may define the twenty-first century, yet Romania remains insufficiently integrated into comparative international research.
Interview by Natalia Crane*
In this inaugural interview of the ECPS Youth Program’s new interview series, designed to introduce a younger generation of scholars working on populism and related fields, ECPS Early Career Researchers Network (ECRN) member Andrei Gheorghe reflects on the conceptual, comparative, and professional dimensions of researching populism in Central and Eastern Europe. The series aims to provide emerging researchers with a platform to present their work, explain their methodological choices, and bring greater visibility to new research agendas in populism, illiberalism, nationalism, and democratic politics.
Gheorghe is a PhD student pursuing a joint doctorate at the University of Bucharest and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research focuses on populism, illiberalism, and nationalism in Eastern Europe, particularly Romania and Hungary, while his doctoral thesis examines how “the people” are constructed in populist discourse in the two countries between 2010 and 2020. He has also published on the political instrumentalization of collective memory in Romania and currently holds a French Government Scholarship.
At the heart of the interview is Gheorghe’s concern that Romania remains significantly understudied in international scholarship on populism. While Hungary has generated extensive academic attention, he argues that “there are very few studies of Romanian populism and Romanian politics on the international stage, and also very few in Romania.” For Gheorghe, this imbalance helps explain his comparative research design: “that is why I chose to compare the two countries: national populism in Romania is very poorly studied and researched.”
His intervention also speaks to a broader diagnosis of contemporary politics. Drawing on Pierre Rosanvallon’s Le siècle du populisme, Gheorghe observes that the twenty-first century may become “the century of populists” amid the decline of traditional ideological formations and the rise of both left- and right-wing populism. “And until now,” he adds, “he has been right.”
The interview further explores Gheorghe’s understanding of populism as a process of constructing “the people,” his comparison of Hungarian and Romanian populist discourse, and the different historical resources mobilized in each case. He also discusses the practical challenges confronting early-career researchers, including limited funding, navigating different academic traditions, and building international scholarly networks—making his reflections especially pertinent to the ambitions of the ECPS Youth Program itself.
Here is our interview with ECRN member Andrei Gheorghe, lightly edited to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
National Populism Rose Even as Living Conditions Improved After EU Accession
People display Qanon messages on cardboards during a political rally in Bucharest, Romania on August 10, 2020. Photo: M. Moira
Thank you so much, Andrei, for joining me for my first interview for this ECPS Voice of Youth project. I have a couple of questions for you about your research. To my understanding, your research interests primarily lie in populism in Romania and Hungary between 2010 and 2020. To begin, could you introduce yourself, outline your academic journey, explain how your research interests developed, and why you believe this research is significant in today’s global environment?
Andrei Gheorghe: Thank you for the question. I am a PhD student in a program under double coordination. It is a PhD program hosted by the University of Bucharest and École des Hautes Études des Sciences Sociales in Paris. I have two coordinators, one Romanian and one French.
I also teach seminars in political science at the University of Bucharest. I have published several articles and one chapter concerning my particular interest in sports and politics, especially how memory is used by the football gallery from my natal town. So, it is a particular interest in politics and sports.
I also work on populism, as you already said. My PhD thesis is on how the people are constructed in populist discourse in Romania and Hungary between 2010 and 2020. I am also a researcher at the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives. You know about the Securitate Archive—what the Securitate was and what Securitate means? It was the political police during the communist regime in Romania.
This political police produced roughly three million files, including files on dissidents, people who were watched by the Securitate and who were against the communist regime, but also files concerning collaborators of the Securitate. It is a public governmental institution. I am a researcher at this institution.
My interest in the topic of national populism comes from my childhood because I grew up during the transition. My parents, friends, and all my relations also grew up during the transition. So, I want to understand why this resurrection of national populism occurred, why this ascension of national populism happened after accession to the European Union, basically after 2008. Because, it was a much more problematic period during the transition after the fall of communism.
Then both countries, Hungary and Romania, became members of the European Union, and living conditions and life in general became much better than during the transition. So, I want to understand what triggered this ascension.
Populism Begins with Constructing a Narrow Definition of “the People”
That’s very interesting. I loved hearing about that. My next question for you is: how do you define populism in your own research, and why have you adopted that particular conceptual approach? And has your definition of populism changed throughout your academic career?
Andrei Gheorghe: Actually, I don’t have a personal definition of populism. What I observe in my research is that populism involves a narrow definition of “the people.” Populists define and construct the people, and that is also the focus of my research.
Basically, all populists try to construct a people and give that construction a particular image, with specific traits and symbolic values. They also seek to exclude “the enemies” and draw the boundaries of the ideal people. In this sense, populism is a kind of amalgam—an arrangement of ideology, populist logic, and artistic representation. But all these elements converge around the idea of “the people” because populists seek to imagine and define who that people is. This is particularly evident in right-wing populism.
As for left-wing populism, we do not really have it in Romania or Hungary. Although my research examines speeches by a prime minister from the Social Democratic Party, the Romanian Social Democratic Party is not particularly social democratic. It is more nationalistic because it inherited old communist networks and communist nationalism, and it is more nationalistic and traditionalistic than socialist.
Hungarian Populism Looks to a Heroic Past, While Romanian Populism Targets Contemporary Elites
Romanian citizens demand an end to a corrupt system. Photo: Constantin Opriș.
My next question is: how do you measure populism in your own work, especially when comparing two different countries? Given that the definition and representation of populism can vary from country to country, how do you balance different research approaches?
Andrei Gheorghe: I start with the definition of populism and apply a qualitative research approach. From this starting point, I analyze speeches and discourses, including through automated analysis. I extract the most important and relevant semantic elements in these speeches and compare the historical and social resources they draw on, as well as the ways in which they seek to construct “the people.”
We can see that Viktor Orbán, in his speeches, constructs the Hungarian people by appealing to the Hungarian nation and its historical existence. He speaks about the millennial state, the millennial nation, the Hungarian nation, the Christian nation, and the Hungarian Christian nation. Hungarians resisted multiple empires, including the Habsburg Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. They have always been in the Pannonian Basin. So, in this narrative, they will also resist Brussels, which is compared with the old imperial capital, Vienna.
This is an appeal to the historical roots of the Hungarian people. Orbán invokes the national revolution of 1848 and the 1956 spring revolution against the Soviets. When he speaks about his 2010 revolution, when he won the elections, he presents it as a new transformation, a new revolution for a new generation, while drawing on earlier Hungarian revolutions fought in the name of freedom.
His victory in 2010 was therefore presented as a new revolution, but again through an appeal to history. His speeches and the constitution are full of historical references and appeals to ethnic and cultural identity. This concerns all Hungarians beyond the country’s borders. He presented himself as the prime minister of all Hungarians, not only those living in Hungary. So, it is a transborder community.
In Romania, by contrast, appeals to nationalism, the nation, and history are less prominent in populist discourse. Instead, populists define “the people” as working people, poor people, enslaved people—Romanian people betrayed by Western elites and by Romanian elites who believe in Western values. In their speeches, they portray Romania as a second-class citizen within the European Union.
So, this discourse does not rely as heavily on history or on the idea of a great nation. This began to change after 2020, with the rise of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) and George Simion. After 2020, the nationalist-populist movement AUR—whose acronym means “gold” in Romanian—entered Parliament. In 2024, they doubled their score. They have 20% of Parliament, and now they are estimated at 40%. It is an astonishing rise.
They now emphasize this nationalistic discourse. They speak about the Romanian people and the great achievements of the Romanian people during communism, including industrial development and other achievements from that period, despite the fact that they are not communist.
So, my comparison is thematic: it is a thematic and qualitative analysis. That is my main approach. I have also conducted a brief quantitative analysis because I wanted to highlight the differences between Hungarian and Romanian discourse. Hungarian discourse is deeply historical and densely populated with references to history and to the ancient past of the Hungarian people.
They try to construct the Hungarian people by referring to their heroic past, when Hungary was an independent kingdom and included regions that are now part of Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Croatia—the idea of Greater Hungary. In Romania, by contrast, there is more of an appeal after 2020 to the recent past, particularly to the communist period, although my research stops in 2020. Before 2020, the discourse was directed against foreigners, international companies, globalism, liberalism, and multiculturalism, while portraying Romanian people as second-class.
ECPS-ECRN Helped Turn Academic Networking into Concrete Research Collaboration
It’s very interesting to look at the comparative approach in the speeches and how frequently you use qualitative analysis. I found that really compelling. Thank you for that. For my next question, I’d like to shift gears a little and ask about your cooperation with other scholars. Contemporary research increasingly depends on international collaboration. How has cooperation with other scholars, academic networks, and initiatives such as the ECPS Early Career Researchers Network (ECRN) influenced your research, professional development, and intellectual outlook?
Andrei Gheorghe: Actually, before becoming a member of the ECPS-ECRN Network, collaboration with other scholars was virtually non-existent. Despite participating in quite a few international conferences—not so many, around nine or ten, but for me that is a lot—I tried to develop my network, but it did not really happen.
After joining the ECPS-ECRN Network, however, I connected with an Italian scholar, and we decided to work together, collaborate, and write an article comparing Italy and Romania.
So yes, I think ECPS is a very good network. It has been a very positive factor in this kind of development.
Romanian Scholars Face Serious Barriers to Participating in International Academic Life
Photo: Shutterstock / GagoDesign
That’s really great to hear. Thank you for answering that question. My next question is: throughout your academic journey, what professional challenges have you faced, and what have been some of the most rewarding moments in your research?
Andrei Gheorghe: The most challenging thing for me was the transition between the French type of analysis and research and the English, Anglo-Saxon type of research, because the French approach is relatively less empirical. Despite being a PhD student in France, my participation in French academia has been quite limited, even though I want to participate more.
My work can be seen as too empirical and not sufficiently elaborate or theoretically sophisticated. But it is also very extensive because I compare two countries, while French scholars often take much narrower subjects for their analysis and go very deeply into a specific topic. So, this transition between French and Anglo-Saxon research has been one major challenge.
Another challenge is that, for Romanian scholars, it is very difficult to participate in academic events outside Romania because funding is almost nonexistent. You often have to pay all the expenses yourself, which is very challenging. There is also the question of how your work is appreciated in Romania.
As a PhD student, you also have to work to make a living. You cannot dedicate all your time to research, so you have to make sacrifices from this point of view.
On the other hand, one major achievement was publishing a chapter in a book edited by Routledge. That was a big achievement for me, as were publishing my articles and participating in conferences.
Romanian Populism Still Remains on the Margins of International Research
That’s great. Thank you so much. And I do agree with you when you say that there are challenges when studying in different countries and adapting to the different approaches that academic cultures take. I completely agree. I’ve experienced it myself. I’m going to give you one last question because, since this is my first interview for this project, I think I overestimated how many questions I would be able to fit in, but I’m getting a good sense of the time frame now. So, let me ask you one final question. Looking ahead, where do you see populism studies evolving over the next decade, especially regarding Hungary and Romania? What areas remain neglected and deserve much more attention?
Andrei Gheorghe: It’s a good question because, in his book Le siècle du populisme (The Century of Populism), Pierre Rosanvallon argues that the 21st century will be the century of populists because of the decline of traditional ideologies—the left, the right, especially the left—and the rise of populism, both left-wing and right-wing populism. But it will essentially be the century of populism. And until now, he has been right.
Concerning Hungary and Romania, Hungary is very well studied. There are many studies and a great deal of research on Hungarian populism. But there are very few studies of Romanian populism and Romanian politics on the international stage, and also very few in Romania. So, that is why I chose to compare the two countries: national populism in Romania is very poorly studied and researched.
I think that my research, and perhaps my participation in international conferences outside Romania, will make more researchers interested in Romanian politics and Romanian populism. To make a confession, when I participated in international conferences outside Romania dedicated to populism, illiberalism, and nationalism, I was the only Romanian, and they looked at Romania and my research as rather exotic. They know about Hungary, they know about Poland and Bulgaria. They know much more about Serbia because of the Yugoslav Wars. What about Romania?
That’s wonderful that you are bringing attention to a subject that is not so widely researched internationally, introducing it at different conferences, and giving it more traction. I think that’s really great for academia. So, I want to thank you very much for talking to me today and for helping me with my project. I think your research is very interesting, and I was really glad to be able to talk to you about it. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Andrei Gheorghe: Thank you, Natalia.
(*) Natalia Crane is currently serving as a Grant Writer at Femme Incroyable ASBL and as a Research Assistant at the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), where she contributes organizational and writing skills to support impactful initiatives. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Germanic Studies, with a focus on International Relations and Global Security, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also completed a Master’s degree in International Politics at KU Leuven, further deepening her expertise in international relations. Her previous roles include research and teaching positions at esteemed institutions, reflecting a strong commitment to analyzing and addressing global political challenges. She is fluent in Polish and English and proficient in German.
In this commentary, Filippo Palmieri examines how digital platforms are reshaping the political socialization of young Europeans. As mass parties decline, politics is increasingly encountered through personalized feeds, influencers, recommendation systems, and fragmented online publics. Palmieri argues that this transformation does not make populism inevitable, but it creates an environment in which populist appeals to immediacy, personalization, and distrust of intermediaries can travel more easily. Drawing on the concepts of “mass individualism” and “bubble democracy,” the commentary explores how digital participation can broaden political engagement while weakening durable forms of representation and accountability. The central democratic challenge, Palmieri suggests, lies in the growing gap between political expression, collective organization, and meaningful representation.
A political message on TikTok rarely arrives alone. It appears between a song, a comic sketch and a creator’s account of an ordinary day. On Instagram, a carousel explaining an election may be followed by an advertisement or a friend’s holiday photograph. For many young Europeans, this is no longer a secondary route into politics. It is where politics is first encountered.
The European Parliament’s Youth Survey 2024 gives a measure of the change. Among Europeans aged 16 to 30, 42 percent name social media as a main source of information on political and social issues. Television follows at 39 per cent (European Parliament, 2025). These figures do not prove that young people have lost interest in public affairs. They tell us something more precise: a generation is forming its political habits inside spaces built around personal profiles, recommendation systems and an endless competition for attention.
The consequences reach beyond communication. Politics learned through a feed has a different pace, different intermediaries and a different sense of proximity. This helps explain why populist language often moves easily across digital platforms. It does not mean that social media manufacture populists. The relationship is less direct, and more interesting, than that.
What the Party Used to Provide
The decline of mass parties is often measured through membership figures or electoral volatility. Those indicators matter, but they capture only part of what has disappeared. A party once offered a place where separate experiences could be translated into common claims. It trained activists, selected leaders and connected local disputes to an interpretation of society. The process was slow. It was also unequal: hierarchies were rigid, internal dissent could be suppressed, and many citizens remained outside the organizations that claimed to represent them. Yet the intermediary was visible. It had offices, rules, officials and a name.
Mauro Calise describes the new configuration as “mass individualism.” The collective actor once organized by party machines has broken into a multitude of connected individuals (Calise, 2025). The phrase is deliberately paradoxical. Users act through personal accounts, but they do so before mass audiences. They can speak and mobilize at a scale that would once have required an organization, while the content reaching each of them is increasingly personalized.
This distinction matters most for those who did not acquire political habits before the digital turn. A twenty-year-old may discover a housing protest through a short video, learn its vocabulary from a creator, share it with friends and join a demonstration organized in a group chat. Information, expression and participation take place on the same device, sometimes within a few hours. As Ohme and his colleagues observe, digital environments have brought exposure to news and political action unusually close together (Ohme et al., 2022).
That can produce real participation. Climate strikes, campaigns against gender violence and mobilizations over university costs have travelled through networks that traditional parties struggled to reach. But the same mobilization may dissolve when attention moves to another issue. A hashtag can assemble a public without building an organization able to negotiate, decide or remain accountable after the peak of visibility has passed.
There is no single European “digital generation” either. A study covering nine countries found marked class differences among young people’s conventional, community-based and online participation (Grasso & Giugni, 2022). Education, resources and political confidence still shape whose voice becomes public. Cheap access to a platform does not make political influence equally available.
Disintermediation Without the Disappearance of Intermediaries
Social media are regularly described as instruments of disintermediation. The term suggests that parties, journalists and associations have been removed from the relationship between citizens and power. Only half of that story is true. Older gatekeepers have weakened; mediation itself has not vanished. It has changed hands.
TikTok’s recommendation system decides which political clip travels beyond its original audience. Instagram gives visual advantage to claims that can be compressed into a reel or a sequence of cards. Influencers translate public controversies into the language of personal experience, while visible counts of likes and shares make some positions appear socially dominant before a user has examined them. None of these mechanisms is politically neutral, even though none resembles a party headquarters or a newspaper editorial meeting.
Damiano Palano’s notion of “bubble democracy” offers a useful description of the result. Palano argues that the public associated with earlier forms of representative democracy is fragmenting into multiple, partly self-referential audiences (Palano, 2019). A bubble is not a sealed room. Users still meet disagreement, and content moves unpredictably between networks. The deeper change concerns the distribution of attention. A controversy that feels unavoidable on one feed may be almost absent from another. Citizens do not simply reach different conclusions; they may begin from different political events.
This is why the familiar image of the echo chamber is insufficient. The problem is not only that people prefer information consistent with their beliefs. Platform publics are temporary and uneven. They gather around an election, a scandal or a war, then rearrange themselves. Public opinion begins to resemble the intermittent convergence of several streams rather than a single national conversation.
Representative politics has always involved distance. Nadia Urbinati argues that representation does not require citizens and representatives to become identical. It depends on a continuing relationship in which decisions can be judged, contested and revised (Urbinati, 2010). Social media create the impression that this distance has closed. A leader speaks from a phone, replies to followers and comments on events before the evening news. The tone is intimate. Power may remain highly concentrated.
Why Populist Narratives Travel Well
Populism fits this environment because it turns representation into a promise of direct presence. A leader speaks as the authentic voice of “the people”; whoever stands between the two can be presented as an obstacle. Parties distort. Experts complicate. Journalists hide. Procedures delay. These accusations long predate TikTok and Instagram, but platforms allow them to be repeated daily, adapted to audience reactions and attached to an individual face.
Personalization is part of the advantage. A recognizable leader circulates more easily than an organization with competing factions and a detailed programme. Speed matters too. Every event can be framed as an urgent test of whether institutions are listening. Conflict completes the pattern: the distinction between an authentic community and those allegedly frustrating its will is well suited to systems that reward reaction.
Still, there is no universal digital law favoring populists. Davidson and Enos examined more than 400 European parties between 2010 and 2020. Populist parties received more engagement than their competitors on Facebook, but the same advantage did not appear consistently on Twitter. It also varied between countries and was concentrated especially among right-wing populists (Davidson & Enos, 2025). Platform architecture matters. So do political culture, party strategy and national context.
Research from the Netherlands adds another complication. People with populist attitudes were more likely to react to political content, yet their use of social media did not consistently trap them in a populist electoral funnel (Jeroense et al., 2022). A feed is not a machine with a predetermined political output. It changes the incentives under which politics is communicated: some claims become easier to circulate, some actors become more visible, and directness acquires a persuasive value of its own.
For young citizens, this is also a question of familiarity. If politics is first experienced through personal profiles and short cycles of attention, the leader’s direct appeal may not look like a rebellion against ordinary democratic practice. It may look like ordinary democratic practice. Bargaining, party organization and institutional compromise then appear distant and evasive, even though they remain necessary whenever a demand must be converted into a collective decision.
A Different Experience of Democracy
It would be misleading to tell this story as a fall from a democratic golden age. Mass parties often demanded obedience and filtered out inconvenient voices. Digital media have allowed experiences once ignored by established organizations to enter public debate. They have made rapid mobilization across cities and borders possible. Young Europeans have used them to force climate change, racial justice, gender equality and economic insecurity onto political agendas.
What has become fragile is the link between expression and representation. A post shared hundreds of thousands of times shows intensity, not necessarily durability or representativeness. A creator can become an influential political interpreter without accepting the obligations normally attached to political leadership. A digital campaign may be remarkably effective at naming a problem and much less able to determine who can legitimately negotiate in its name.
Young Europeans have not abandoned politics. They are learning it in a public sphere whose boundaries move from one issue to the next and whose most powerful intermediaries seldom present themselves as political institutions. This does not make populism inevitable. It makes the populist promise of immediacy easier to recognize and the suspicion of mediation easier to understand.
The relevant question, then, is not whether young people are democratic enough. It is what democracy comes to mean when it is first encountered as a stream of personalized messages rather than as membership in a collective organization. The passage from mass parties to digital bubbles is therefore more than a shift in political communication. It is a change in the everyday experience through which representative politics becomes intelligible.
(*) Filippo Palmieri holds a master’s degree in International and Diplomatic Sciences, specializing in Politics and International Security, from the University of Bologna. His research focuses on democratic theory, populism, political representation, the transformation of political parties and the effects of digital communication on contemporary democracy. His master’s thesis examined the changing analytical value of the concept of populism in twenty-first-century democracies. He has presented research on democracy, populism and illiberalism at academic events hosted by the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, the Italian Political Science Association and Venice International University. Email: filippo.palmieri3@studio.unibo.it
Davidson, T. R. & Enos, J. (2025). “Engaging populism? The popularity of European populist political parties on Facebook and Twitter, 2010–2020.” Political Communication, 42(1), 171–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2024.2369118
Grasso, M. & Giugni, M. (2022). “Intra-generational inequalities in young people’s political participation in Europe: The impact of social class on youth political engagement.” Politics, 42(1), 13–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211031742
Jeroense, T.; Luimers, J.; Jacobs, K. & Spierings, N. (2022). “Political social media use and its linkage to populist and postmaterialist attitudes and vote intention in the Netherlands.” European Political Science, 21(2), 193–215. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-020-00306-6
Ohme, J.; Andersen, K.; Albæk, E. & de Vreese, C. H. (2022). “Anything goes? Youth, news, and democratic engagement in the roaring 2020s.” The International Journal of Press/Politics, 27(3), 557–568. https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221093008
Palano, D. (2019). La democrazia alla fine del “pubblico”: Sfiducia, frammentazione, polarizzazione: verso una “bubble democracy”? Governare la paura, 35–92.
In this Voice of Youth (VoY) piece, Emaan Zahra examines the intertwined environmental and developmental costs of the rapid expansion of generative artificial intelligence. She argues that AI’s seemingly immaterial convenience rests on resource-intensive infrastructures whose growing demands for freshwater and electricity can intensify environmental pressures, contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, and affect communities surrounding data centers. At the same time, Zahra draws attention to the implications of habitual AI use for children, particularly when technological assistance substitutes for independent learning, critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. Connecting these concerns, she presents AI proliferation as a dual challenge for climate sustainability and the intellectual development of younger generations. Zahra calls for greater responsibility from parents, educators, technology companies, and policymakers to establish boundaries that enable technological progress while protecting environmental resources and children’s capacity for independent thought.
By Emaan Zahra
Today, the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is growing very fast. This growth creates many serious problems all over the world. To fix these problems, we must look at how AI works behind our screens. AI has quickly become a normal part of daily life for most people. This has created a habit of overusing technology. This constant use hurts the environment and changes how children grow up. While we enjoy the speed of AI, we ignore its real-world costs. In the end, the convenience of AI harms our planet and weakens the thinking skills of the next generation.
The Hidden Environmental Cost of AI
The computers that power AI search engines and chatbots require a massive physical setup. A decade ago, technology companies used simple liquid cooling systems to keep their computers from overheating. These older systems did not require too many resources. However, as millions of people started using AI, computers had to work much harder and faster. To stop their systems from crashing, big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta now use huge amounts of electricity and freshwater. These companies need perfectly clean water, so their expensive computers do not rust or break. Because AI is so popular today, the demand for these natural resources has skyrocketed.
How AI Drains Local Water Supplies
The huge amount of water used by AI data centers directly hurts local communities. These centers take water from nearby lakes, rivers, and underground supplies. This is the exact same water that families, neighborhoods, and schools rely on every day. Research shows that asking an AI chatbot just 20 to 50 simple questions can use up to one full liter of water. Over time, this adds up to a massive amount. AI cooling systems waste enough water to fill nine Olympic-sized swimming pools every single day. Even worse, 80% of this water turns into vapor and is completely lost to the air. This causes a real water crisis for the people living near these computer centers.
Energy Pollution and Climate Change
Along with wasting water, AI centers need an incredible amount of electricity to stay turned on. Experts estimate that by the year 2030, AI energy needs will increase by 400%. This is the same amount of electricity that the entire United Kingdom uses in a whole year. For example, Google reported that its push into AI caused its total greenhouse gas emissions to rise by 48% compared to 2019. Because most electricity still comes from burning coal, oil, and gas, power plants have released over 30 billion tons of pollution recently. This pollution traps heat, raises global temperatures, and causes worse hurricanes, floods, and climate change.
The Problems with Proposed AI Fixes
Scientists and tech companies have tried to think of ways to fix these problems, but most ideas are not practical yet. One popular idea is to build data centers underwater so the cold ocean can cool the computers naturally. However, salt water is highly corrosive. It can easily leak into the pods and destroy the delicate technology. Another idea is to launch AI data centers into outer space as satellites. While this would save Earth’s water, it is way too expensive and dangerous right now. Space debris and rocket pollution make this a very distant dream. Because these fixes do not work yet, our local environments continue to suffer.
How Environmental Damage Hurts Children’s Health
This damage to nature directly harms the health and safety of young children. To understand this problem, we have to look at a child’s everyday surroundings. The air pollution from burning fossil fuels for AI electricity has caused a rise in lung illnesses among children. Young bodies are still growing, and their lungs are small. This makes them highly vulnerable to bad asthma and permanent lung damage. In addition, climate change ruins crops and alters weather patterns, which causes food shortages and high grocery prices. The invisible power grids that run our apps are creating a physical health crisis for children.
How AI Weakens a Child’s Thinking Skills
At the same time, easy access to AI tools threatens the mental growth and independent thinking of children. When young students let machines do their schoolwork, their brains do not get the exercise they need to grow. Instead of figuring out hard problems, students use AI chatbots to write essays, read stories, and solve math homework. This habit weakens the brain just like a lack of exercise weakens a muscle. If you stop walking, your leg muscles will waste away. In the exact same way, the human brain gets weaker if it is shielded from challenges. Children who rely completely on AI may never learn how to analyze information deeply.
The Loss of Creativity and Memory
The long-term danger of relying on AI is that children lose the ability to spot lies, think of new ideas, and solve problems creatively. Learning these skills takes years of practice and making mistakes without help. Because AI gives perfect answers in a split second, children learn to accept whatever the computer tells them. They do not double-check facts or think critically. Because of this, their knowledge stays very shallow. They do not truly understand what they are learning. This instant gratification loop also shortens attention spans and makes it hard for children to remember things. Instead of learning to think for themselves, kids are trading their brainpower for fast answers.
A Path Forward
The rapid rise of AI creates a double crisis for our environment and our children’s minds. The hidden computer systems behind AI drain vital water supplies and cause heavy air pollution, hurting local families. At the same time, using chatbots as an academic shortcut stops children’s brains from developing properly. To fix this, parents, teachers, and tech companies must work together. We need to set strict limits on how much power AI uses and how children use it in school. Only by setting these boundaries can we protect our planet and keep the next generation smart and independent.
Emaan Zahra is a 16-year-old aspiring student who believes that that the over and unnecessary consumption of AI is very harmful for our minds and climate. She would like to note that she believes that AI should prosper in medical and industrial fields but in ones day to day tasks it should be used as little as possible or not at all. Email: emaanzahra212@gmail.com
In this reflective Voice of Youth commentary marking Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day on August 25, PS Ayaas, a young Rohingya writer, activist, and community advocate, examines the enduring relationship between genocide, statelessness, exclusion, and political belonging. Drawing on the Rohingya experience, Ayaas argues that the 2017 violence cannot be separated from decades of citizenship restrictions, majoritarian nationalism, and narratives that constructed a minority population as an alien “other.” He connects this history to broader debates on populism, showing how exclusionary definitions of the “people” can normalize discrimination and undermine democratic protections. Moving beyond remembrance, Ayaas calls for accountability, equal rights, recognized education, sustainable livelihoods, meaningful Rohingya participation, and conditions for voluntary and dignified return. His central message is unequivocal: remembrance must become responsibility, and belonging must never be conditional.
Every August 25, I remember a day that did not end when the gunfire stopped. For Rohingya families, August 25 is not simply a date in history. It is carried in memory: in the stories of parents, in the names of villages, in photographs saved after flight, and in the silence that sometimes follows a question about home. I was still a child when I first understood that leaving home could mean never knowing when, or whether, you would see it again.
Rohingya communities mark August 25 as Genocide Remembrance Day to honor those who were killed, those who survived, and those who continue to live with displacement. But remembrance also asks a harder political question: how did an entire population come to be treated as if it did not belong?
From Violence to Exclusion
The violence of 2017 cannot be understood as an isolated eruption. It emerged from a much longer history of legal, political and social exclusion. Rohingya communities in Myanmar faced restrictions on citizenship, movement, education, marriage and livelihoods long before the mass displacement of 2017.
The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar documented the scale and systematic character of abuses committed during the 2017 military operations. It reported that more than 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh and documented killings, sexual violence and the burning of villages. UN human-rights investigators also recorded patterns of violence and deliberate actions that created fear and drove Rohingya civilians from their homes.
This history matters because genocide does not begin only when the world sees bodies or burning villages. It can be preceded by years of making a population politically disposable: denying people a secure legal identity, portraying them as outsiders, restricting their movement and normalising discrimination.
The 1982 Citizenship Law became a central part of this exclusionary structure. Rohingya were increasingly treated not as a recognised national community but as foreigners in the place many had always called home. The political message was devastatingly simple: you may live here, but you do not fully belong here.
The Politics of “Us” vs “Them”
This is where the Rohingya story becomes relevant to the study of populism. Populist politics often divides society into a morally pure “people” and an allegedly dangerous “other.” The boundaries of the “people” can be constructed through ethnicity, religion, race or nationality. Once a minority is portrayed as an existential demographic, cultural or security threat, exclusion can be presented not as discrimination but as protection.
Myanmar’s experience shows how dangerous this logic can become when it interacts with majoritarian nationalism, state power and organized violence. Anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya narratives did not remain confined to rhetoric. They helped create an environment in which discrimination could be normalized, and extraordinary violence could be justified. This does not mean that every aspect of the Rohingya crisis can be explained by populism. Military authoritarianism, ethnic nationalism, citizenship policy, colonial legacies, local conflicts and political economy all matter. But the construction of an “authentic” national community while defining a minority as alien offers an important lens.
The danger is not limited to Myanmar. Across the world, migrants, refugees and minorities can be turned into symbols of national decline or threats to social cohesion. When political actors persuade citizens that rights belong primarily to the “real people” and that minorities are outsiders who deserve fewer protections, democratic institutions become vulnerable. The Rohingya experience is therefore not only a humanitarian story; it is also a warning about what happens when belonging becomes conditional.
Remembering What Statistics Cannot Say
More than 700,000 Rohingya crossed into Bangladesh following the 2017 violence. In 2026, UNHCR reported that around 1.2 million stateless Rohingya remained in Bangladesh. Numbers are essential for policy, but numbers cannot tell us what displacement feels like. A statistic cannot describe a mother deciding what to carry when a lifetime must fit into a few possessions. It cannot describe a child growing up knowing the name of a village he or she has never seen. It cannot capture the psychological weight of living in a place that is simultaneously a refuge and a reminder that the original home remains inaccessible.
Nine years after the mass displacement, displacement has become a childhood, an adolescence and, for many young Rohingya, almost an entire lifetime. Humanitarian assistance remains essential, but humanitarian assistance alone cannot constitute a political solution. UNHCR reported in 2026 that limited livelihood opportunities left Rohingya refugees heavily dependent on aid.
This creates a dangerous paradox. The international community says that the future should ultimately be sustainable, while policies surrounding displacement can leave young people with too few opportunities to acquire recognized education, build livelihoods or participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their lives.
Home Is More Than a Location
For many Rohingya, return to Myanmar remains the deepest expression of hope. But “return” cannot simply mean crossing a border. A return that leaves people stateless, unsafe, segregated or without freedom of movement would reproduce the conditions that made displacement possible. A sustainable return requires citizenship or an effective legal status guaranteeing equal rights, physical security, freedom of movement, access to education and healthcare, protection of property and meaningful participation in public life.
International law has already placed important obligations on Myanmar. In January 2020, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered provisional measures requiring Myanmar to take measures within its power to prevent acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention and to preserve evidence. In July 2022, the Court rejected Myanmar’s preliminary objections and confirmed that the case could proceed. The proceedings are not a substitute for political action, but they demonstrate that the Rohingya question is not simply a matter of humanitarian charity. It is also a matter of international law, accountability and rights. The Rohingya should therefore not be asked to choose between justice and return, or between hope and realism. A genuine pathway home must combine both.
A Future Cannot Be Built in a Waiting Room
The greatest danger of protracted displacement is that waiting becomes normal. A child who has spent nine years in a refugee settlement is not living through a temporary interruption. Those years are education, adolescence, friendships and formative memories. A generation can lose opportunities while governments continue to describe its situation as temporary. Durable solutions must therefore be broader than repatriation alone. First, Rohingya children and young people need meaningful, recognized and continuous education. Second, refugees need safe and lawful opportunities to develop skills and livelihoods rather than being treated as permanently dependent. Third, Rohingya representatives — especially women and young people — must have meaningful roles in discussions about return, protection, education, resettlement and reconstruction.
Third-country pathways should also be discussed honestly where appropriate, without turning resettlement into a substitute for the right to return. Different Rohingya families may have different futures. Some may return when conditions permit; some may pursue resettlement; others may build lives in Bangladesh or elsewhere. A rights-based approach must respect those choices rather than forcing one political solution upon an entire people.
Remembering As Resistance
On August 25, remembrance is more than mourning. It is a refusal to allow political violence to erase political responsibility. To remember is to say that the dead had names. The villages had names. The families had histories. The people who fled were not an anonymous mass. They were citizens, neighbors, students, farmers, teachers, parents and children whose lives were interrupted by violence and exclusion.
It is also to say that the story did not end at the Bangladesh border. The crisis continues in displacement, statelessness, insecurity in Rakhine State, shrinking humanitarian resources and the uncertainty of a generation growing up without a secure relationship to home. Remembrance is therefore a challenge to the international community. If the world recognizes atrocities but allows the political conditions that produced them to remain, remembrance becomes ritual without prevention.
The lesson of August 25 is not simply “never forget.” It is “never normalize.” Do not normalize statelessness. Do not normalize indefinite displacement. Do not normalize political narratives that define minorities as less deserving of rights. Do not normalize a humanitarian crisis that has lasted so long that an entire generation has grown up inside it.
A Future in Which Belonging Is Not Conditional
I still think about home. For my generation, home is sometimes a place we remember through our parents’ stories. It is a landscape inherited through memory. But home should not have to remain only a memory.
The future of the Rohingya should not be decided by the logic that excluded us in the first place. We should not be forced to prove that we deserve to belong. We should not have to choose between dignity and survival.
A meaningful future requires accountability for grave crimes, equal rights, political inclusion, education and livelihoods, and conditions that make return genuinely voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable. It also requires listening to Rohingya people themselves.
Every August 25, the world is invited to remember what happened. It must do more than remember. It must understand how exclusion was built, how an “other” was created, how violence became possible, and how those patterns can be prevented elsewhere.
Remembrance is the beginning of responsibility. And responsibility means building a future in which no child has to learn that belonging can be taken away.
PS Ayaasis a young Rohingya writer, activist and community advocate based in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. He is the founder of Refugee Wellness Mission, a youth-led initiative supporting community wellbeing, and currently pursuing a Bachelor of Health Science through the University of the People. His writing addresses displacement, statelessness, and the lived experience of the Rohingya community, drawing on volunteer work with organizations including BRAC and Save the Children, and participation in international fellowships focused on human rights, health, and youth empowerment. He speaks English, Bengali, Burmese, Hindi, and Rohingya. His work has previously appeared with the European Center for Populism Studies and Mixed Migration Center. Email: rohingyapubgsquad@gmail.com
Nearly a decade after the mass displacement of the Rohingya, an entire generation has come of age in refugee camps where their lives are shaped by decisions they rarely help make. In this compelling ECPS Voice of Youth (VoY) article, PS Ayaas, a young Rohingya writer and community organizer, challenges the humanitarian paradigm that casts refugee youth primarily as beneficiaries of aid. Drawing on both lived experience and policy analysis, he argues that young Rohingya are already leading initiatives in education, human rights, environmental protection, and community development despite severe structural constraints. The article calls for a fundamental shift from tokenistic consultation to meaningful participation, insisting that sustainable humanitarian governance must recognize refugee youth as partners, decision-makers, and changemakers in shaping their collective future.
I have grown up watching decisions about my future being made in rooms I could not enter. I am a young Rohingya living in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and I know the particular sound of a meeting happening somewhere close by, on the other side of a fence or a tarpaulin wall, deciding something about people like me without any of us inside it. Like thousands of other young people here, I have learned to build a future inside a place designed around uncertainty — where the rain decides some days whether a path is walkable, where a shelter roof gets patched more times than anyone bothers to count, where you learn early which queues take an hour and which take a whole morning. We are surrounded by humanitarian services, policies, assessments, and programs intended to protect us. Yet too often, the people designing these responses are speaking about young Rohingya rather than listening to us.
I know what it means to be grateful for assistance and, in the very same breath, to feel that your own voice is missing from the decisions that shape your life. Both things are true at once, and I have mostly stopped trying to resolve that contradiction, because living inside it is simply what it means to be young and Rohingya right now. I have watched young people keep studying despite severe limitations, volunteer in their communities with almost nothing to give, and organize around health, education, human rights, and environmental protection anyway — not because someone funded it, but because waiting for permission has never been something any of us could actually afford. These are not small things. They have convinced me of something I now hold as a plain fact rather than an opinion: Rohingya youth should not be treated only as beneficiaries of humanitarian assistance. We must be recognized as participants, problem-solvers, and changemakers.
Nearly a decade after the 2017 exodus, Cox’s Bazar remains home to close to a million Rohingya refugees, roughly half of whom are children and adolescents (UNICEF, 2025). Yet in nearly every major decision that shapes our daily lives — what we are permitted to study, where we may travel, whether our camp stays open or closed during a national election — young Rohingya are treated overwhelmingly as recipients of policy rather than participants in it. The international response to this crisis has structurally cast youth as beneficiaries of aid rather than as capable agents of change, even as a growing, under-recognized body of youth-led organizing inside these camps tells a very different story.
A Generation Defined by Ceilings
The most concrete example of this structural ceiling is education. Rohingya children in Bangladesh are, by government policy, not permitted to study in Bangladeshi schools and are barred from enrolling in formal schools outside the camps (Human Rights Watch, 2019). A 2022 pilot finally began offering instruction based on Myanmar’s national curriculum, reaching its first 10,000 students that year (UNICEF, 2022) — a genuine milestone, but one that arrived five years late and still reaches only a fraction of eligible youth. That fragile progress is now reversing. Foreign aid cuts have forced the closure of learning centers, and as of 2025, kindergarten and primary facilities across the camps remain shuttered while youth vocational centers have shut down entirely (UNICEF, 2025). Human Rights Watch (2025) reports that roughly 437,000 school-age children in the camps have been affected. Girls face a compounding barrier: while they make up roughly half of primary-level learners, safety concerns and restrictive gender norms reduce female participation at the secondary level to roughly twenty-five percent (Global Partnership for Education, n.d.).
For me, education has never been simply a classroom experience. I have studied by whatever light was available that evening, through a connection that drops mid-sentence, with materials passed hand to hand until the pages soften at the edges, and with a persistent uncertainty about where any of it actually leads once you reach the ceiling the policy has already built for you. Studying, some days, feels less like preparation for a future and more like an act of pure persistence, undertaken without any proof it will be rewarded. I continue anyway, because education has never meant a certificate to me. It means the possibility of becoming useful to my community, whatever shape that usefulness eventually takes — and some days, on the hardest ones, it is simply the one part of the day that still belongs to me and not to the camp around it.
Movement and livelihood are constrained in much the same way. Human Rights Watch (2022) documented curfews, checkpoint harassment, and arbitrary travel denials across the camps. Ahead of Bangladesh’s February 2026 national elections, camp authorities ordered the camps “sealed,” severely restricting movement (Fortify Rights, 2026). The International Crisis Group (2024) frames these restrictions on movement and the right to work as systemic pressures that leave refugees with no formal pathway to self-sufficiency. An entire generation is coming of age inside a system explicitly built to withhold the two pillars of adult independence: higher education and legal work.
The Agency the System Doesn’t Account For
What the policy framework misses is what is already happening despite it. I have felt this agency personally through community volunteering — in the small, unglamorous work of showing up for people who live three shelters down, in conversations that happen on a doorstep rather than in a workshop, in the particular satisfaction of solving something small and real for someone you actually know. Working directly alongside other young people has taught me that refugees do not need to be taught only how to receive services. Many of us already understand the particular, textured challenges of our environment, because we live inside them every day without a break, in a way no assessment visiting for an afternoon ever quite captures. What we lack is not motivation. It is the resources, the structural recognition, and the institutional space to turn what we already know into lasting action.
Across the camps, youth-led initiatives prove this daily, in ways that rarely make it into the reports written about us. In community leadership and rights work, the Rohingya Youth Union runs mentorship and problem-solving workshops designed specifically to bridge the learning gaps the formal system leaves open (UNHCR, n.d.-a), while the Rohingya Youth Advocacy Network, established in 2023, has grown to more than 700 volunteers coordinating human rights advocacy and community programming (Rohingya Khobor, 2025d).
In grassroots protection and media, the IOM’s Poribortok — “change makers” — program has trained 400 young Rohingya to lead neighborhood-level efforts against gender-based violence (International Organization for Migration, n.d.), and in late 2025 a four-day media workshop trained seventy young Rohingya storytellers and videographers to document their own community instead of continuing to rely on outside narrators (Rohingya Khobor, 2025a, 2025b). In ecological stewardship, the Rohingya Environmental Protection Network, founded entirely by young volunteers, coordinates practical projects and education addressing the deforestation and climate vulnerability our overcrowded camps now face (Rohingya Khobor, 2025c).
What unites all of it is that none of it waited for permission from the humanitarian structures meant to serve us. It exists as living evidence against the premise that Rohingya youth need to be spoken for.
Why the Gap Persists: A Policy Critique
If this agency is already visible, why does the policy conversation still so rarely include it? Part of the answer is structural. A camp environment built around restricted movement, capped education, and no legal right to work does not simply fail to cultivate youth leadership — it actively works against the conditions leadership normally requires. Omata’s (2022) fieldwork in Ghana’s Buduburam camp found much the same pattern: even when refugees acquired real skills through aid programs, the surrounding economic and legal environment made those skills nearly impossible to apply. Skill-building without any legal pathway to use those skills locally does not build capacity. It builds frustration.
It would be unfair to say Rohingya participation does not exist at all. Humanitarian agencies frequently engage refugee volunteers, community leaders, and informal committees, and I have been one of those volunteers. But the deeper problem is the distance between participation and decision-making. A young refugee is often asked to help implement a program, and far more rarely given any seat at the table where that program was actually designed. The problem, in other words, is not only that Rohingya youth are excluded from decision-making. It is that humanitarian systems are losing real, local knowledge every time they treat young refugees primarily as beneficiaries rather than as partners. “Nothing about us, without us” cannot remain an advocacy slogan. It has to become an operational standard — for program design, for monitoring, for evaluation, for all of it.
What Changes When Youth Become Partners
When young Rohingya are engaged as agents rather than recipients, the outcomes are not abstract. Community-based protection work led by trained young volunteers has proven significantly more effective at reducing stigma and shifting harmful social norms than top-down messaging campaigns designed elsewhere and delivered to us (UNHCR, 2025). Youth-led journalism is producing an authentic archive of camp reporting, quietly shifting narrative authority from international outlets back to the community those outlets have long written about. Youth-run environmental and advocacy networks are building local organizational capacity that outlasts funding cycles entirely, unlike the rigid, externally designed projects that tend to disappear the moment a grant runs out.
What Meaningful Participation Should Look Like
Moving from tokenistic consultation to genuine policy partnership requires structural change, not better intentions. I believe four reforms matter most.
First, institutionalized youth advisory structures. Humanitarian coordination platforms should establish formal, representative Rohingya youth advisory groups with direct consultative status during the drafting of Joint Response Plans and strategic policy reviews — not consulted after the fact, but present while the plan is still being written.
Second, direct, accessible micro-funding. Donors should create streamlined, small-scale grant mechanisms specifically for legitimate refugee-led youth organizations, bypassing the bureaucratic hurdles that keep resources concentrated among established international organizations instead of the young people already doing the work.
Third, accredited education and vocational pathways. Education policy has to look past basic literacy. Aid agencies and host authorities need to expand access to accredited secondary curricula, certified digital skills training, and tertiary scholarships, so that studying leads somewhere rather than stopping at a ceiling by design.
Fourth, transparent institutional accountability. Participation needs measurable consequences. When agencies consult young refugees, they should be expected to report back — clearly, and in public — on which youth recommendations were accepted, which were modified, which were rejected, and why.
Conclusion: Living Between Uncertainty and Action
I do not know exactly where my own future will lead. Like many young Rohingya, I live with daily uncertainty about where I will study, work, or build a permanent life — whether the place I am sitting in right now, writing this, is where I will still be sitting in five years, or ten. But that uncertainty has not removed my desire to contribute. If anything, it has sharpened it, and strengthened my belief that young people must be given real opportunities to shape the communities we are already serving, whether or not anyone ever officially asked us to.
I do not ask the world to listen to Rohingya youth simply because we are young, or because we are refugees. I ask it to listen because we know our communities from the inside, in ways no external assessment can fully reach. We know what works. We know what fails. We know what our families quietly fear at night, and what young people here still hope to build, even now, even without much reason to expect it.
Nearly a decade into one of the world’s largest and most protracted refugee crises, young Rohingya are already learning, volunteering, organizing, creating, and leading — often in the same week we are also queueing for rations, patching a roof before the next rain, or walking further than we should have to for water. We are not waiting to become changemakers. We are already trying, today, with what little the system gives us, to change what we can. The only real question left is whether the international systems surrounding us will keep speaking for us — or finally make room for us to speak, participate, and help shape the future we are the ones who will actually have to live inside.
PS Ayaas is a young Rohingya writer based in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, currently studying Bachelor of Health Science at the University of the People. His writing draws on lived experience of displacement, statelessness, and community organizing, and focuses on repositioning Rohingya youth as active participants and changemakers rather than passive recipients of humanitarian aid. He has previously been recognized in the Mixed Migration Review writing competition, and is currently developing an essay on Rohingya it was named as Living in Limbo: Voices and Resilience of The Rohingya Protracted and displacement. Email: rohingyapubgsquad@gmail.com
In the concluding installment of her series, Lianne Nota offers a theoretically and empirically grounded reassessment of the relationship between populism and racialization. Moving beyond conventional assumptions, she demonstrates that while racialization is central to certain forms of right-wing populism, it is not an inherent feature of populism itself but contingent upon broader ideological configurations. By foregrounding the role of “new racism” and the discursive linking of categories such as migration, religion, and security, Nota reveals how exclusionary boundaries can be constructed without explicit reference to race. At the same time, the analysis highlights the possibility of de-racializing political discourse through more inclusive articulations of “the people.” The article thus advances a nuanced framework for understanding how language shapes political belonging and exclusion.
By Lianne Nota*
This series set out to explore a question that is often overlooked in populism research: how and under what conditions does racialization shape the construction of the populist ‘people’? By analyzing parliamentary debates in the Netherlands, the findings point to a clear but nuanced conclusion. While racialization plays a significant role in right-wing populism, it is not an inherent feature of populism as such.
Is Racialization Inherent to Populism?
A key takeaway from this study is that populist actors do not automatically produce racialized understandings of ‘the people.’ Both Dutch populist parties under examination relied on a populist logic separating ‘the people’ from ‘the elite,’ yet only one consistently constructed these categories in racialized terms.
This suggests that the presence of racialization depends less on populism itself, and more on the ideological context in which populism is articulated. In the case examined here, right-wing populist discourse constructed ‘the people’ through exclusionary boundaries that essentialized cultural and religious differences, while left-wing populist discourse emphasized inclusivity and resisted such essentialization.
At the same time, this finding should not be taken to mean that left-wing populism is inherently immune to racialization. Rather, it highlights the importance of examining these dynamics empirically, rather than relying on a priori assumptions regarding the presence (or absence) of racialization in populism.
New Racism
Another important insight is that racialization often operates indirectly. Throughout this study, explicit references to race were absent. Instead, references to culture, religion, and civilization performed a similar function. By presenting religious and cultural differences as fixed and immutable, the discourse created boundaries that closely resemble racial hierarchies, without ever using the language of race itself.
This reflects what scholars have called ‘new racism,’ where cultural differences replace biological difference as the basis for exclusion. Another word to describe this type of racism is cultural racism. Cultural or new racism is not necessarily less innocent than ‘traditional’ biological racism, for the cultural boundaries that separate people from each other are presupposed to be absolute, meaning no ‘outsider’ can ever be assimilated into ‘the people (MacMaster, 2001: 194-195). In other words, “cultural racism as a discourse performs the same task as biological racism, as culture functions in the same way as nature, creating closed and bounded cultural groups,” (Wren, 2001: 144).
Understanding racialization in this broader sense is especially important in contexts like the Netherlands. As mentioned in the first article, discussions of racism are often avoided by a majority of academics and policymakers in the Netherlands (Grosfoguel & Mielants, 2006). However, this does not mean that racism is absent from the Netherlands. In fact, as Weiner (2014) argues, racism takes a peculiar form in the Netherlands, rooted in the denial of race as significant and the particular Dutch history of colonization. Building on this, this study shows us how exclusionary logics can persist even in the absence of explicit references to race or racism.
The Importance of Discursive Linkages
The analysis also shows how racialization does not occur only through how ‘the people’ are described, but also through how different categories are linked together.
In right-wing discourse, groups such as Muslims, migrants, and terrorists were frequently connected, forming a broader threatening ‘Other.’ This process can be understood as kind of a discursive chain, where distinct categories are treated as equivalent.
This finding builds on existing scholarship on populism. While scholars have used the idea of a ‘chain of equivalence’ to explain how demands are linked together (Laclau, 2005), this study suggests that a similar logic can operate in the construction of perceived threats. By linking different groups into a single category, the boundaries of ‘the people’ become sharper and can exclude large portions of society from ‘the people’.
Looking Forward
Taken together, these findings draw attention to how processes of (de-)racialization are implied in the construction of the populist ‘people.’ In doing so, this study suggests that race, racism, and racialization are concepts that should be considered more systematically in relation to populism. Societally, this study demonstrates (again) that discourse has real consequences for real people. How something or someone is talked about has real-world implications that can affect the inclusion or exclusion of particular groups from society. In particular, this study warrants us to pay attention to how exclusion is naturalized through language and how groups of people are systemically excluded even in absence of terms like ‘race.’
At the same time, this article series also suggests that such exclusionary discriminatory framings are not inevitable. By emphasizing inclusivity, the protection of human rights, and the rule of law, more pluralistic understandings of ‘the people’ can be advanced.
However, like any study, this analysis has its limitations. It has focused on a single country, a specific time period, and a limited number of political actors. As such, the findings cannot be generalized to all cases of populism across the world.
This opens up avenues for future research. Comparative research across different countries could help determine whether similar patterns emerge elsewhere. It would also be interesting to analyze less traditional platforms like social media networks in order to examine whether racialization plays out differently depending on the platform of choice. Finally, future research could link the discursive dimension of racialization more to the material or institutional dimensions of racialization, for example, by examining how racializing or de-racializing discourse translates into policy decisions and institutional practices.
Ultimately, this article series highlights a broader point: how we talk about ‘the people’ matters. The boundaries drawn through language shape who is included and who is excluded. Paying attention to these boundaries is therefore not only an academic exercise, but also a necessary step in understanding and potentially challenging the dynamics of exclusion in contemporary politics.
(*) Lianne Nota is an ECPS intern and Research Master’s student in International Relations at the University of Groningen, with a focus on identity, populism, ontological security, and the ethics of global affairs. These article series is based on her paper “Constructing ‘The People’: The Role of Racialization in Dutch Populist Discourse”that she wrote for her specialization phase at RUG.
References
Grosfoguel, R., & Mielants, E. (2006). “Introduction: Minorities, Racism and Cultures of Scholarship.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 47(3–4), 179–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020715206065780
Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason (1st edn). Verso.
Weiner, M. F. (2014). “The Ideologically Colonized Metropole: Dutch Racism and Racist Denial.” Sociology Compass, 8(6), 731–744. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12163
In the third installment of her series, author Lianne Nota presents a nuanced comparative analysis of how “the people” are constructed within Dutch populist discourse. Drawing on parliamentary debates, she demonstrates that right- and left-wing populist actors do not merely differ in tone but articulate fundamentally distinct logics of political belonging. While the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) constructs a homogeneous and exclusionary “people” through the racialization of a Muslim “other,” the Socialistische Partij (SP) advances a more inclusive, civic conception that actively resists such boundary-making. By juxtaposing processes of racialization and de-racialization, Nota offers a compelling empirical contribution that challenges prevailing assumptions about populism’s relationship to exclusion, highlighting instead the contingent and discursive nature of political community formation.
By Lianne Nota*
In the previous parts, we outlined the project in terms of literature, method, and data. In this part, the findings of the analysis will be shared. To reiterate, this study analyzed parliamentary debates about migration, Islam, terrorism, and radicalization in the Netherlands during the 2015 refugee crisis. Through a comparison of how a right- and left-wing populist party spoke about ‘the people’ and various Others, the role of racialization in the construction of ‘the people’ was analyzed. What emerged is not just a difference in tone or emphasis, but a fundamentally different understanding of who belongs and who doesn’t.
PVV: The Homogenous Judeo-Christian People, the Tacialized Muslim Other and the Culpable Elite
The Construction of ‘the People’
PVV consistently presented itself as the party for the ordinary, hardworking, overlooked people. For example, in the debate on the terrorist attacks in Paris at the beginning of January 2015, frontman Geert Wilders stated that “I am [emphasis added] one of the victims, and not just me, but the entirety of the Netherlands and lots of others” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a). As part of the common Dutch people, the PVV thus insisted on representing their voice.
For the PVV, ‘the people’ consisted of an innocent Judeo-Christian community that is being threatened by ‘Islamization.’ For example, one speaker expressed that “Islam is alien [‘wezensvreemd’] to the Judeo-Christian and humanist norms, values and traditions on which the Dutch society is based” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015b). In the context of the terrorist attacks in Paris, Wilders stated that he was “furious that, because of Islam, innocent victims fell again: jews, Islam critics and innocent people” and that “Islam simply does not belong to the Netherlands and is a danger to it,”(Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a).
Islam was portrayed as slowly taking over and threatening ‘our’ culture, for example, through an expression like “we are having to put our [emphasis added] Christian culture with the garbage” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015c).Wilders even explicitly mentions that he does not see the encounter with Islam as a clash of civilizations, but rather as “a clash, a confrontation, between civilization and barbarism” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a). Entire population groups (primarily Muslims) are thus systematically excluded from ‘the people’ along civilizational lines.
The Construction of ‘the Other’ and ‘the Elite’
The construction of ‘the people’ by PVV happened also through constructing a foreign Other. In this regard, PVV speakers positioned themselves as warriors for freedom fighting against Islam, and simultaneously as experts in Islam. For example, Wilders declared that “I am standing here to fight the root of all evil. That root of all evil is called Islam. I-s-l-a-m. Islam,” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015d). At the same time, one of the PVV speakers portrayed an SP opponent as ignorant in claiming that “it takes a lot of work to know exactly what Islam represents and how you can recognize it. I’m not going to give a lecture about it. To Ms. Karabulut of the SP, I say: bury yourself in the books, in the Quran, in hadith, and in the sira. Then you have enough to read and maybe you’ll find out,” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015b). This signaled the PVV’s anti-Islam and anti-Muslim position in the debates, while at the same time bolstering their claims as authoritative speakers.
For PVV, the boundaries between Muslims, immigrants, and terrorists were fundamentally blurred. This becomes most clear in the debate about the terrorist attacks in Paris, where Wilders claimed that “of course not all Muslims are terrorists, but almost all terrorists nowadays are Muslims,” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a). He continued, “For decades, mass immigration has brought hundreds of thousands of people with an alien culture into Europe, into our country. Why do we import all this misery? Islam brings hate and violence everywhere it goes,” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a).
In passages like these, it is assumed that terrorism stems from Islam, and through mass immigration, we are inviting Islamist terrorists to our country. Importantly, PVV speakers also linked these categories discursively through attributing physical features. Immigrants were portrayed as “masses of young men of around 20 years with beards” singing “allahu akbar-like songs” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015c). This obviously refers to young Muslim men. But in the data, terrorists were described by Wilders as “people who scream allahu akbar” as well, linking terrorists to immigrants and Muslims (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015d).
As for the elite, PVV speakers depicted political opponents and ruling parties not only as failing to address issues like terrorism and migration, but also as actively enabling them. For example, in the context of the Paris terrorist attacks, Wilders starts by saying that “of course the government is not responsible for every attack.” Still, he continues that “if someone who could have been stopped from returning to the Netherlands, if someone who the government has stopped from returning to Syria, if someone from another Schengen country comes to the Netherlands and commits a terrorist attack, then this government has blood on its hands,” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a). Statements like these elevate responsibility into moral blame.
These kinds of accusations were blended with portrayals of political opponents as “the political elite who look away,”(Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a), “incompetent” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a) and “scandalously neglecting its duty” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a).
PVV speakers also frequently used a kind of rhetoric that was meant to ridicule political opponents, for example declaring that “I was scared for a moment that clown Bassie [a famous clown in a children’s tv programme] was standing in front of me, but it was mister Kuzu” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015b). As opposed to these political opponents, PVV was depicted as telling the uncomfortable but necessary truth. For example, Wilders mentions that “it’s an awkward truth, but one that must be told: we are talking today about an invasion, an Islamic invasion of Europe, of the Netherlands,”(Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015c). The mixing of these strategies creates a sharp moral divide between ‘the people’ as represented by the PVV and the elite who are portrayed as detached from or indifferent to concerns of ‘ordinary’ Dutch people.
Presence of Racialization in the Discourse
The framing of ‘the people’ by the PVV can be seen as an instance of racialization. There is a boundary that is drawn very clearly between ‘us,’ ‘the people,’ and ‘them,’ Islam or Muslims. In addition, Islam is constructed not merely as a set of beliefs, but as an essentialized and homogeneous category that is incompatible with ‘our’ Dutch identity. In this regard, ‘we’ are clearly presumed superior vis-à-vis ‘them.’
Furthermore, the PVV construction of ‘the elite’ did not directly racialize ‘the people’ but could indirectly reinforce how racialization happens. The strong moral opposition between ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’ heightens the sense of urgency and crisis, which indirectly strengthens the exclusionary boundaries drawn between ‘people’ and ‘other.’ Overall, the PVV thus constructed a threatening racialized ‘other’ which, in turn, sharpened the boundaries of ‘the people’ as a homogeneous collective.
SP: The Inclusive People, the De-racialized Other and the Irresponsible Elite
The Construction of ‘the People’
In contrast to the PVV, the SP tried to portray itself as the protector of the rule of law and individual freedoms by emphasizing “the freedom to think, believe, draw, and write whatever you want” as a central part of ‘our’ democracy (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a). SP speakers also stressed that they represented the ‘ordinary’ people in terms of wealth. For example, a speaker assertively stated that “nothing is shared fairly. Everything is for the rich, and those who are poor are screwed” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015e).
SP members also emphasized that the Netherlands is generally a rich country, such as claiming that “in a rich country like the Netherlands, nobody sleeps under a bridge and we don’t eat from trash bins” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015f). SP thus positioned itself as defenders of the law and the less wealthy.
The ‘people’ constructed by SP was also a far more inclusive category compared to PVV. For example, regarding the terrorist attacks in Paris, the frontman of SP at the time, Emile Roemer, stated that “I am also here to protect the freedom of all [emphasis added] Dutch people. That means I have a lot of trouble with Mr. Wilders describing 1 million Dutch people with an Islamic background as potential terrorists,” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a).
In the other debates as well, it becomes clear that, for the SP, Muslims are explicitly included in their understanding of ‘the people.’ For example, in one debate, a SP member stated that “I want to clarify that we should all stand firm for the freedoms and fundamental rights of all people, whether it concerns Islamic people, non-religious people, or people of a different religion,” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015b). In this way, ‘the people’ is constructed not as a homogeneous entity but as a diverse collective united by the law.
The Construction of ‘the Other’ and ‘the Elite’
As for the construction of a foreign Other, the SP presented itself as a protector of vulnerable communities and their human rights, often explicitly opposing the PVV. For example, Roemer expressed that “people fear attacks in the Netherlands and wonder how they can defend themselves when terror comes so close. But people also fear that divisions between population groups are growing, between Muslims and non-Muslims, and that people of good will are being pitted against each other,” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a).
SP also expressed their involvement in these communities by positioning itself as an eyewitness to the experiences of these minorities, especially migrants. For example, Roemer stated that “my party members have seen with their own eyes how vulnerable children are who are in the region of Syria, Libanon or Turkey,” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015g). SP thus saw itself as defender of the human rights and safety of vulnerable people, especially migrants.
For the SP, the boundaries between Islam, migrants, and terrorists were very clearly maintained. While SP speakers also addressed issues such as terrorism, they did so mostly from a legal point of view, describing terrorism as “a horrible form of criminality” or terrorists as “people who try to overthrow or harm the legal order here or in other parts of the world,” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015h). SP speakers were adamant that terrorists should be seen as “extremists that attack our freedoms under the flag of Islam,” instead of ordinary Muslims (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015a). As such, rather than Islam or Muslims being framed as ‘other,’ terrorists are the clear ‘other’ of a ‘people’ that expressly includes Muslims.
As implied before, migrants and refugees were frequently constructed as vulnerable individuals rather than a potential threat. This was done, for example, by explicitly including children in descriptions of migrants. In this regard, Roemer talked about “children of 3, 4, 5 years old selling flowers in those camps to be able to buy something like a slice of bread,” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015g).Thus, just like ‘the people’ are seen as victims of terrorism, refugees and migrants are seen as victims of war and conflict, similarly in need of protection by the government.
As for their attitude towards the elite, the SP was markedly less aggressive and condemning towards the ruling parties and the government than the PVV. The SP did frame political elites as naïve and detached, such as in statements like “the prime minister is bailing again” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015g) or calling on a minister to “do his job better” and asking whether “he still has all his ducks in a row” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015h). However, in general, SP discourse was fairly institutional and targeted towards policy effectiveness. Rather than accusing the government of betraying the people, it was (constructively) criticized for not doing enough or not taking the right actions.
Presence of De-racialization in the Discourse
As a result, the framing of ‘the people’ as including multiple diverse population groups could be seen as an act of de-racialization that can be summed up by the following contribution: “Whether it concerns people who are black or white, whether they are being persecuted because of their race or their religion; people are people, European or not, and they remain people,” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2015e). Here, race and religion are both explicitly invoked to argue that they should not be used as discriminatory bases. Therefore, the SP’s discourse constructs ‘the people’ largely in a more inclusive and civic way, rather than drawing divisions between groups of people in society.
Two Logics?
Taken together, the analysis demonstrates that the constructions of ‘the people,’ ‘the other,’ and ‘the elite’ are combined in different ways with different effects by PVV and SP. While PVV consistently constructed a homogeneous ‘people’ through racializing a threatening ‘other’ reinforced by a strongly antagonistic ‘elite,’ SP constructed a more inclusive understanding of ‘the people’ by resisting the racialization of out-groups. These findings highlight not only important differences between right- and left-wing populist actors but also raise important questions about the relationship between populism and racialization in general. In the following and final part, we will therefore reflect on what these findings mean for how we understand the relationship between populism and racialization more broadly.
(*) Lianne Nota is an ECPS intern and Research Master’s student in International Relations at the University of Groningen, with a focus on identity, populism, ontological security, and the ethics of global affairs. These article series is based on her paper “Constructing ‘The People’: The Role of Racialization in Dutch Populist Discourse”that she wrote for her specialization phase at RUG.
In the second installment of her series, the author Lianne Nota advances the analysis by developing a rigorous methodological framework for studying the construction of “the people” in populist discourse. Moving beyond abstract theorization, she introduces a discourse-analytical approach grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis and the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), emphasizing the interplay between language, power, and historical context. By operationalizing racialization through boundary-making, essentialization, and moral differentiation, Nota provides a precise analytical toolkit for identifying how political actors construct inclusion and exclusion—even in the absence of explicit racial references. Focusing on Dutch parliamentary debates during the 2015 refugee crisis, this contribution bridges conceptual and empirical inquiry, offering a nuanced pathway for examining how populist narratives produce and legitimize social hierarchies.
By Lianne Nota*
To analyze how and if Dutch populist actors have constructed ‘the people’ in racialized terms, we are in need of an empirical approach to actually study these processes in practice. This approach needs to be attentive to how ‘the people’ is not a concept determined a priori, but how they are actively constructed by populist parties in particular contexts. This is where a discourse-analytical perspective comes in.
Adopting a Discursive Approach
While discourse is a notoriously hard concept to define, for this article series, it is enough to understand that discourse refers to how language use in speech and writing functions as a form of ‘social practice.’ This means that a discourse constitutes situations, people, and objects of knowledge, but is also socially conditioned by them (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997: 258). In other words, discourse treats language not as a neutral medium, but as a form of social practice. Language does not merely reflect social and political reality but also constitutes it.
To capture these dynamics, this series draws on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and more specifically on the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) in order to analyze racialization in populist discourse.
The Discourse-Historical Approach
The DHA is particularly well-suited for studying questions of racialization because the original purpose of the DHA was to examine racism and discrimination in the context of antisemitism (Reisigl, 2017: 44-45). What distinguishes DHA from other types of CDA is that it links linguistic analysis to broader political and historical contexts (Wodak & Reisigl, 2016: 583).
In practice, this means that DHA combines three levels of analysis: (1) identifying key topics within a discourse, (2) examining discursive strategies through which different groups are constructed, and (3) analyzing the linguistic means through which these strategies are realized (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016). This means paying close attention to how political actors name certain groups, what characteristics they attribute to them, how they justify these attributions, and how they position themselves in relation to them.
The Data
Empirically, the analysis focuses on parliamentary debates in the Netherlands that have as their main topic migration, Islam, terrorism, or radicalization, because these debates are most salient in terms of racialized constructions of ‘the people’ (de Koning, 2020; Silverstein, 2005; Selod & Embrick, 2013; Woodbridge et al., 2025). In terms of periodization, I look at the year 2015 when debates surrounding these topics were highly relevant due to the 2015 refugee crisis.
The analysis will be organized around two distinct but interrelated categories: ‘the people’ and “the Other.” These ‘Others’ can be further divided into two categories: the elite and the foreign Other. While the foreign Other typically only plays a role in right-wing populism (which is assumed to be exclusionary), it is included here as a separate category to allow for a systematic comparison between PVV and SP. This structure allows for a distinction between how ‘the people’ themselves are directly constructed, how ‘the people’ are (or are not) constructed in contrast to a foreign Other, and how ‘the people’ are constructed in opposition to ‘the elite’.
Identifying Racialization in Practice
Building on the earlier discussion of racialization (see the first article in this series), this study operationalizes it through three criteria.
Boundary-making: a distinction is drawn between ‘the people’ and others;
Essentialization: groups are portrayed as homogenous and defined by fixed characteristics;
Moral differentiation: these groups are evaluated in normative terms (e.g. as good, dangerous, inferior etc.)
By analyzing how these elements appear in populist discourse, it becomes possible to identify whether and how racialization happens, even without explicit mentions of race.
Looking Ahead
What happens when we apply this approach in practice?
In the next article, we turn to the empirical analysis and examine how Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV), a Dutch right-wing populist party, and Socialistische Partij (SP), a Dutch left-wing populist party, constructed ‘the people’ in parliamentary debates. By looking closely at how groups are named, described, and contrasted with others, we begin to see how different versions of ‘the people’ take shape. As we will see, while both parties drew on a populist logic separating ‘the people’ from ‘the elite,’ they constructed these boundaries in fundamentally different ways, raising important questions about how and when racialization enters populist discourse.
(*) Lianne Nota is an ECPS intern and Research Master’s student in International Relations at the University of Groningen, with a focus on identity, populism, ontological security, and the ethics of global affairs. These article series is based on her paper “Constructing ‘The People’: The Role of Racialization in Dutch Populist Discourse”that she wrote for her specialization phase at RUG.
References
de Koning, M. (2020). “The racialization of danger: Patterns and ambiguities in the relation between Islam, security and secularism in the Netherlands. “Patterns of Prejudice, 54(1–2), 123–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2019.1705011
Fairclough, N., & Wodak, R. (1997). “Critical discourse analysis.” In: Discourse as Social Interaction (pp. 258–284). SAGE.
Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2016). “The discourse-historical approach (DHA).” In: R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (3rd edn, pp. 23–61). SAGE.
Selod, S., & Embrick, D. G. (2013). “Racialization and Muslims: Situating the Muslim Experience in Race Scholarship.” Sociology Compass, 7(8), 644–655. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12057
Silverstein, P. A. (2005). “Immigrant Racialization and the New Savage Slot: Race, Migration, and Immigration in the New Europe.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 34(Volume 34, 2005), 363–384. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.34.081804.120338
Wodak, R., & Reisigl, M. (2015). “Discourse and Racism.” In: D. Tannen, H. E. Hamilton, & D. Schiffrin (Eds), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 576–596). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118584194.ch27
Woodbridge, E., Vanhouche, A.-S., & Lechkar, I. (2025). “The racialization of radicalization and terrorism: Belgian political language on Muslims and Islam.” Ethnicities, 25(5), 701–723. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968251329926
