Panel IV of the ECPS Conference 2025, held at St Cross College, Oxford University (July 1–3), explored the theme “Politics of Belonging: Voices and Silencing.” Chaired by Dr. Azize Sargın (ECPS), the panel investigated how belonging is constructed and contested through populist discourse and historical memory. Dr. Maarja Merivoo-Parro (University of Jyväskylä) examined olfactory memory and grassroots aid in Estonia’s democratic awakening. Maria Jerzyk (Masaryk University) analyzed how the figure of the child is symbolically instrumentalized in Polish populism, revealing deep continuities with communist-era narratives. Together, the papers offered rich insights into how identity, exclusion, and affect shape democratic participation in post-authoritarian and populist contexts.
Reported by ECPS Staff
Panel IV of the ECPS Conference 2025, titled Politics of Belonging: Voices and Silencing, was held on the morning of July 2 at St Cross College, University of Oxford. As part of the broader conference theme—‘We, the People’ and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches—this panel delved into how democratic belonging is shaped, contested, and narrated within and beyond populist frameworks.
Chaired by Dr. Azize Sargın (PhD), Director of External Relations at the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), the session opened with a theoretically grounded overview of the politics of belonging. Dr. Sargın emphasized that in an age of resurgent populism, belonging is no longer a neutral or merely affective category but a highly politicized mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. Populist actors increasingly construct “the people” by drawing sharp lines between insiders and outsiders, often invoking exclusionary logics tied to ethnicity, morality, or national destiny. Drawing on insights from political theory and migration studies, she outlined two key dimensions of belonging: “to whom one belongs” (social group affiliation) and “where one belongs” (spatial-territorial identity), both of which play critical roles in populist and post-authoritarian contexts.
The panel featured two intellectually rich and methodologically distinct papers. Dr. Maarja Merivoo-Parro (Marie Curie Fellow, University of Jyväskylä) explored the role of olfactory memory in the democratization of Estonia, arguing that cross-border sensory exchanges—especially smells tied to Finnish aid—played a profound role in shaping political consciousness and belonging during the late Soviet period. Maria Jerzyk (Masaryk University, Czechia) examined how children are symbolically deployed in contemporary Polish populist narratives, tracing striking continuities with communist-era state propaganda. She showed how the child functions as both a vessel of national purity and a screen for projecting anxieties over societal change.
Together, these contributions offered a powerful demonstration of how the politics of belonging operate through both the body and the imagination—an approach that resonated strongly with the interdisciplinary aims of the ECPS Conference.
