1103116

research-article2022
BPI0010.1177/13691481221103116The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsLöfflmann

Special Issue Article

The British Journal of Politics and

Introduction to special issue: International Relations

2022, Vol. 24(3) 403­–415
© The Author(s) 2022
The study of populism in
international relations
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221103116
DOI: 10.1177/13691481221103116
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Georg Löfflmann

Abstract
The rise of nationalist populism, its challenge to representative democracy and the populist impact
on the liberal international order have emerged as one of the most significant phenomena in
international politics in recent years. This special issue brings together a group of researchers
from a wide range of theoretical, disciplinary and epistemological backgrounds, including political
science, populism studies, foreign policy analysis and critical security studies, to examine the
international dimension of populism and the practical impact of populism on foreign policy and
international security. Empirically and conceptually, it presents audiences in political science,
international relations and related disciplines with a timely review of the scope of research on
populism in international relations. Our specific aim is to explore and evaluate what challenges a
populist mobilisation of anti-elitism and anti-globalism presents to both the contemporary study
of international politics, and the structure of the international system and key actors within it.

Keywords
foreign policy, international relations, international security, political rhetoric, populism, voter
mobilisation

The election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States and the success of
Brexit in the European Union (EU) referendum campaign in the United Kingdom in 2016
are two of the most prominent examples of a populist disruption of the status quo in inter-
national politics in recent years. Alternatively described as ‘wave’ (Aslanidis, 2016),
‘surge’ (Mudde, 2016) and ‘explosion’ (Judis, 2016), the global rise of populism and the
prominence of populist leaders in government in the Global North and South – for exam-
ple, Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Rodrigo Duterte (Philippines), Recep Erdoğan (Turkey),
Alberto Fernández (Argentina), Boris Johnson (UK), Narendra Modi (India), Viktor Orbán
(Hungary) and Donald Trump (USA) – has greatly increased academic interest in the inter-
national and transnational aspects of this populist phenomenon, and how populists in
power impact individual foreign policy outcomes, as well as the interaction of populism
with globalisation and the structure of the liberal international order at large (Chryssogelos,
2017; Plagemann and Destradi, 2019; Verbeek and Zaslove, 2017; Wajner, 2020).

Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS), University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

Corresponding author:
Georg Löfflmann, Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS), University of Warwick, Coventry
CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: g.lofflmann@warwick.ac.uk
404 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 24(3)

In considering the relationship between populism and foreign policy, the analytical
focus shifts on how the basic antagonism of the ‘people’ versus the ‘elite’ becomes pro-
jected onto the international sphere, targeting those policies, ideologies, institutions, and
organisations whose inherent multilateralism and internationalism populist anti-globalists
reject in the name of reclaiming national sovereignty and popular authority (Jenne, 2021;
Wojczewski, 2019). Globalisation and the structural transformation of states in the inter-
national system in terms of their reduced capacity for socio-economic regulation and
subsequent adaptation to trans- and supranational forms of governance and policy legiti-
mation, such as the EU, have significantly affected the domestic relationship between
elites and the people (Chryssogelos, 2020; Krastev, 2017). This erosion of national sov-
ereignty is engendering ‘tensions in the relationship between official power and political
community’ (Chryssogelos, 2020: 23) that lie at the heart of the populist mobilisation of
popular discontent and anti-establishment resentment. Demands for the renationalisation
of policies by populist voters and politicians range from border security and immigration
control to trade protectionism and reforming or ending national membership in interna-
tional organisations and free trade agreements.1
Exploring the international, transnational and global dimensions of the populist phe-
nomenon has thereby significantly widened the scope of populism research, where schol-
ars were traditionally more concerned with the domestic sphere, putting a particular
emphasis on issues of voter mobilisation (Jansen, 2011; Roberts, 2015), the populist con-
tent of political communication (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007; Rooduijn and Pauwels,
2011) and the political and discursive significance of populist leaders (Hawkins, 2009;
Weyland, 2001). Comparative perspectives, on the contrary, tended to focus on populist
movements and political party systems in Latin America and Europe especially (de la
Torre, 2015; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2012b), but did not particularly consider wider
global interactions, foreign policy or the realm of international security.
The growing literature on populism in international relations (IR) has in turn priori-
tised populism’s role in informing the foreign policy decision-making processes of popu-
list leaders and parties (Jenne, 2021; Lacatus and Meibauer, 2020; Wehner and Thies,
2020; Özdamar and Ceydilek, 2020) and how populist rhetoric, beliefs and performances
interact with security discourses and practices. Here, social constructions of enmity, exis-
tential threat and crisis, and discursive processes of internal and external Othering
(Wojczewski, 2020), the populist securitisation of policy issues such as trade and immi-
gration (Fermor and Holland, 2020), the centrality of securitisation to populism’s per-
formative style, aesthetics and rhetoric (Kurylo, 2020), as well as the mobilisation of
narratives of ontological (in)security (Steele and Homolar, 2019) against so-called ‘ene-
mies of the people’ are especially noteworthy. Populist discourses like ‘America First’
and ‘Take Back Control’ construct their respective security imaginaries of socio-eco-
nomic threat, political alienation and socio-cultural anxiety decidedly as non-elitist artic-
ulation of the ordinary fears and concerns of the ‘real people’ (Beeman, 2018; Freeden,
2017; Malik, 2018). In identifying establishment failure and linking the existence of a
corrupt elite to wider socio-economic and socio-cultural anxieties and insecurities, popu-
list performances and discourses simultaneously emphasise dramatisation, personalisa-
tion, emotionalisation, and conflict in their antagonistic framing of policy issues and
representation of international politics (Moffitt, 2016; Wodak, 2015).
Populists fundamentally legitimate their claim to power and authority by claiming to
speak for the forgotten people who have lost faith in mainstream politics, unaccountable
elites, technocratic governance, dysfunctional institutions and discredited ‘globalist’
Löfflmann 405

policies and ideologies, from cosmopolitanism to European integration and multilateralism

that are threatening them both on a material level, and in disrupting their own sense of iden-
tity and national belonging. Populism thereby appears both as popular response by particu-
lar voter segments to a perceived crisis of legitimacy of liberal democracy, which leaves
them disillusioned, emotionally adrift and disappointed (Mair, 2013), and as mode of politi-
cal persuasion deliberately employed by political entrepreneurs to reinforce popular senti-
ments of political dysfunction, existential crisis, national decline and systemic failure.
Nationalist populists in power ranging from Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán and Jair
Bolsonaro have raised the spectre of democratic erosion towards far-right authoritarianism
and even fascism (Mudde, 2019; Stanley, 2018). Jan-Werner Müller (2017) and a majority
of populism scholars cite the eradication of heterogeneity and pronounced hostility towards
pluralism in populism’s articulation of a homogenised ‘will of the people’ as inherently
anti-liberal and existential threat to the functioning of liberal democracy as populists in
power erode institutional constraints and the protection of civil liberties and minority
rights. Based on a comparative cross-regional study of populism’s impact on democracy,
Mudde and Kaltwasser (2012a) have argued that populism can have positive attributes for
consolidating or deepening democracy as an oppositional force, for example, through
increasing political participation and including marginalised groups and their demands and
interests into the political process. Such democratic gains, however, were ultimately com-
ing at the expense of liberal features, such as institutional independence of the judiciary
once populists are in power, resulting in the erosion of checks and balances and the con-
centration of executive power (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2012a). Translated onto the inter-
national sphere, the impact of nationalist, right-wing or authoritarian populism is
analogously identified as threat to the existence of a rules-based liberal international order
and the functioning of key institutions and organisations, from continued EU integration to
the survival of NATO, potentially signalling a return of great power politics in the 21st
century marked by competing spheres of influence (Boyle, 2016; Schrank, 2017).
Post-Marxist political theorists like Ernesto Laclau (2005) and Chantal Mouffe (2018),
on the contrary, award left-wing populism and associated groups such as the Spanish
Podemos or Syriza in Greece a positive, emancipatory-progressive quality for highlight-
ing genuine socio-political and socio-economic grievances in society and responding to
the crisis of legitimacy of contemporary liberal democracy. Left-wing or progressive pop-
ulism is seen here as necessary democratic counter to a neoliberal centrist consensus and
the depoliticisation and disempowerment of societies through technocratic transnational
governance. In the words of Giorgos Katsambekis (2020: 16), ‘populist actors of the left
envisage “the people” in a distinct way, asserting inclusion rather than exclusion, advo-
cating an egalitarian vision of society, fighting inequalities and opposing strict hierar-
chies’. This inclusive conceptualisation of the ‘people’ also opens up the possibility for a
progressive transnational populism, for example, in the construction of a pan-European
popular community that transcends national identities and constitutes a European demos
acting as democratic corrective to the technocratic governance model of the EU (Panayotu,
2017). Populism and its articulation by the populist radical right is therefore viewed as
existential threat to liberal democracy (Galston, 2018; Mudde, 2019), while, on the con-
trary, populism is also characterised as a necessary reform mechanism that can reinvigor-
ate the democratic process through (re)integrating politically alienated or economically
underprivileged segments of the population, giving rise to popular demands for more
democratic input in government and supporting greater plurality in political party systems
(Ellenbroek et al., 2021; Mouffe, 2018; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2012b). What unites
406 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 24(3)

these competing perspectives, however, is that they both characterise populism as rela-
tively flexible political mode and communicative logic that can adapt to the particularities
of different national contexts and specific grievances, anxieties and resentments in the
name of reclaiming national sovereignty and popular representation.
This special issue builds and expands on this extant research in IR, critical security
studies (CSS) and populism studies by engaging with the discursive, strategic and per-
formative aspects of contemporary populism, centring its analysis on the global, transna-
tional and international dimensions of the populist phenomenon. The various contributions
of this special issue explore how the social construction of a fundamentally hostile exter-
nal environment and an antagonistic identity politics interlinking both the domestic and
international sphere informs populist rhetoric, electoral strategies of voter mobilisation,
and the (re)making of foreign and security policies. In particular, the special issue seeks
to explore how populist actors derive political legitimacy and achieve policy impact from
constructing a hostile imagination of world politics in which populists claim to protect the
‘real people’ against the political, economic and ideological Otherness of elites, the cor-
rupting influence of their global interactions and the national manifestations of crisis and
insecurity that their discredited policy programmes have supposedly brought about in the
present.
The individual contributions collected in this special issue therefore provide a compre-
hensive overview of the study of populism in IR while engaging a wide range of theoreti-
cal, methodological and epistemological perspectives in exploring the variegated
manifestations of populism in world politics and the significance of populist-informed
foreign and security policies. While populism has proved notoriously difficult to define,
with some authors characterising it as an inherently contested or fragmented concept
(Laclau, 2005; Taggart, 2000), the literature in populism studies has recently sought to
provide greater conceptual clarity, identifying three main analytical approaches, desig-
nated as ideational (Mudde, 2017), political-strategic (Weyland, 2017) and socio-cultural
(Ostiguy, 2017), respectively. According to the influential definition by Cas Mudde
(2017), which has found widespread acceptance by scholars following ideational and
discursive approaches, populism constitutes a ‘thin ideology’ that considers society to be
separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ and the ‘the
corrupt elite’, demanding that politics operates exclusively as an expression of the volonté
générale of the former. The political-strategic approach instead focuses on the mobilisa-
tion strategies by populist leaders and self-identified establishment ‘outsiders’, who claim
power in the name of the people, targeting voters by translating popular grievances and
anti-establishment resentment into contentious political action (Weyland, 2017). The
socio-cultural approach adopts a broader view, treating populism as transgressive politi-
cal style and media performance that disrupts conventional notions of ‘high politics’ and
elite norms of political behaviour and public communication. Displays of bad manners
and ‘low politics’ are designed to shock and disrupt the status quo while cementing the
polarising appeal of populists with their distinctive audiences (Moffitt, 2016; Ostiguy,
2017). Ultimately, however, the boundaries between these approaches are relatively fluid
and they all share an overriding emphasis on the significance of political rhetoric, com-
munication, discourse and performative styles that revolve around an antagonistic core
logic of politics.
For the authors collected in this special issue, a basic antagonism that is socially con-
structed and politically communicated between national sovereignty, popular authority
and an established system of institutional and representational mechanisms and its elite
Löfflmann 407

members therefore provides a common conceptual starting point to capture the interna-
tional features of populism. Two contributions in this special issue focus in this context
on the political rhetoric of populist leaders as key performers of populism and how their
antagonistic framing of the international sphere and foreign policy issues interlink with
their domestic popular appeal. Daniel F. Wajner examines the transnational patterns in
this performative dynamic. Wajner argues that contemporary populist governments show
a growing willingness to transfer the discursive construction of an antagonistic relation-
ship between the ‘people’ and the ‘elites’ to the regional and global spheres as a way of
legitimising themselves internally and externally. According to Wajner, a transnational
legitimation strategy satisfies various psychological, institutional and political needs of
contemporary populist leaders, as it helps them to reach, attract and politically activate
both national and international sympathisers. This populist quest for international legiti-
misation is illustrated via a comparative analysis of cases in Europe, the Americas, the
Middle East and Southeast Asia. Corina Lacatus and Gustav Meibauer in turn explore the
interlinkage of populist rhetoric and popular appeal by right-wing populist leaders, focus-
ing in particular on how populist claims to authenticity and leaders’ embrace of ‘truthi-
ness’ interlink with a nationalist populist policy agenda. A qualitative content analysis of
the electoral speeches of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump is used here to examine how
these key populist figures attempted to communicate ‘authentically’ to their respective
audiences, reinforcing their populist brand via their hostile (re)imagination of interna-
tional politics as zero-sum arena of confrontation and persistent struggle against alien
Others. Where Gramsci (1975) saw the role of ‘organic intellectuals’ in the role of a soci-
etal vanguard to challenge common sense and ultimately change a reigning capitalist
hegemony, nationalist populists like Trump and Johnson seem to operate more akin to
organic anti-intellectuals whose permanent communicative and behavioural transgres-
sions serve to undermine established liberal democratic norms and the political status quo
in order to advance their personal aggrandisement and consolidation of power.
Understanding the ideational and material factors that have contributed to the global
rise of populism and assessing its political consequences thereby also require a critical
analysis of the practical cooperation and shared worldviews uniting different populist
leaders, parties and movements (Stengel et al., 2019), and the operational and ideological
significance of a global ‘populist international’ (Applebaum, 2016). In examining the
shared ideological underpinnings of the contemporary global wave of nationalist pop-
ulism, Jelena Subotic’s contribution to this special issue explores the enduring role of
antisemitism in forging such ideational connections via the identification of a common
enemy. While positing that antisemitism has historically provided an ideational founda-
tion for a plethora of different nationalist and populist movements, Subotic focuses on
contemporary manifestations of transnational antisemitism in populist movements in
Europe and the United States to demonstrate the role their international connections and
mutually reinforcing ideological platforms play in the development and maintenance of a
global ‘populist international’. As Subotic argues, the strategic use of antisemitism in far-
right populist foreign policy discourse has thereby undergone a significant transforma-
tion, as evidenced in the increasing decoupling of attitudes towards Israel from
antisemitism against diaspora Jews and a rise in pro-Israel policies among far-right anti-
semitic parties and movements.
A comprehensive examination of the role of populism in IR thereby also demands an
analytical focus and empirical scope beyond the story of populism in the ‘West’ to capture
its wider transnational and geopolitical manifestations. In their contribution to this special
408 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 24(3)

issue, Sandra Destradi, Johannes Plagemann and Hakkı Taş accordingly shift attention
from a prevalent focus on European politics and the Global North towards populist
dynamics in the Global South. A theoretical framework linking literatures on populism
and politicisation is applied to a comparative study of Turkey and India, two prominent
examples of populist governments, which have endorsed nationalist religious ideologies
in legitimating their claim to political power and authority. Based on a systematic analysis
of party programmes, official speeches and social media data, Destradi, Plagemann and
Taş demonstrate when and how populist leaders politicise both regional-level and global-
level foreign policy issues, and to what effects. Their analysis of the public statements by
Erdoğan and Modi shows that these two nationalist populist leaders emphasised different
dimensions of populism in their rhetoric and that this corresponded to a variation in the
politicisation of foreign policy in both scope and content.
A more carefully calibrated understanding of populism in IR, at the same time, also
necessitates a more nuanced understanding of the conceptual differences and similarities
in the international outlook of left-wing and right-wing populists, as well as the respective
homogeneity or heterogeneity within and across these groupings. Ernesto Laclau (2005)
characterised the relative ‘vagueness and imprecision’ of populism as ‘essential compo-
nent’ of its discursive operation, given the necessity to subsume a heterogeneous and
fluctuating social reality of competing political claims and antagonistic relationships
under a homogeneous identification of the ‘people’ flexible enough to both encompass
and transcend these tensions and to constitute a common political identity to which all
those who were intended to be included could subscribe by projecting their hopes and
aspirations into populism’s ‘empty signifier’. This projection manifests, for example, in
the figure of the populist leader as personification of the ‘will of the people’ (Laclau,
2005: 118). Whether in its nationalist or progressive forms, however, the representational
and performative features of populism are constituted as an antagonistic, counter-hegem-
onic discourse (Mouffe, 2005: 71–77), a social identification as mode of resistance that is
meant to challenge a reigning political and socio-cultural elite and its claims to authority
and legitimacy. In the words of Yannis Stavrakakis, populism constitutes the articulation
of social practices into political identities, which seek to build new hegemonies
(Stavrakakis, 2017). In her contribution to this special issue, Soraya Hamdaoui thereby
explores how political elites in France have responded to such a populist challenge of the
establishment by focusing on the anti-populist strategy of La République en marche!
(LREM) during the Yellow Vest (Gilets Jaunes) protests and comparing it with the politi-
cal reaction against Rassemblement National (RN), the former Front National (FN),
France’s main nationalist populist party. Hamdaoui argues that while the political estab-
lishment of LREM ostracised and demonised the RN to contain its political progression,
their reaction to the populist Yellow Vest movement was far more balanced and cautious.
The article distinguishes two types of anti-populism, an adversarial one in opposition to a
nationalist populist party and an accommodative one taken in response to a populist social
movement. According to Hamdaoui, mainstream parties can respond to ‘street populism’
with an accommodative anti-populism that is less binary and allows more political prox-
imity with the populist challengers, while elites’ distrust towards the people as xenopho-
bic, hostile and politically inferior nonetheless remains visible.
Following post-structuralist inspired work on nationalism and populism (Katsambekis
and Stavrakakis, 2017), the phenomenon of nationalist populism can generally be con-
ceptualised as discursive linkage with populism centred on the signifier of ‘the people’
and separating society alongside an up/down axis between the ‘pure people’ and the
Löfflmann 409

‘corrupt elite’ (Laclau, 2005; Mudde, 2004), while nationalism is centred on the signifier
of the nation, constructing a political antagonism through the division of an Inside and
Outside, resulting in nationalist populist discourses attributing blame both ‘above’ and
‘below’ and ‘outside’ (Anastasiou, 2019; De Cleen and Stavrakakis, 2017). Nationalist
populism, alternatively referred to in the literature as authoritarian populism (Norris and
Ingelhart, 2019), right-wing populism (Wodak, 2015), and radical right populism
(Mudde, 2019), constructs an idealised, homogeneous popular community as only legiti-
mate carrier of political sovereignty, defined as the ‘hard-working, God-fearing, patri-
otic citizens’ (Kazin, 1998: 288) and in particular idealising the White working-class
inhabitants of the rural ‘heartland’ (Taggart, 2000), which are elevated over the corrupt
and cosmopolitan urban elites, as well as underserving Others, in particular immigrants
and minorities. The ‘pure people’ (Mudde, 2004) are the foundation of the community;
they have been robbed of their rightful political, socio-cultural and economic primacy
and they must be restored to their proper place and society regenerated (Mény and Surel,
2001). Right-wing populism designates a nativist–nationalist conceptualisation of the
people as ethno-cultural gemeinschaft, an exclusive national community of shared origin
and destiny, both separated against the nefarious elites ‘above’ as those unwanted outsid-
ers from ‘below’ and ‘outside’ to which the blame for the decline of the nation and the
loss of status of the in-group is attributed (Golec de Zavala and Keenan, 2021). This
results in the amalgamation of national and popular sovereignty in nationalist populist
discourse, where the popular community of the ‘real people’ is elevated to the status of
sole relevant carrier of political authority and national identity; through the mechanisms
of blame attribution, Othering, emotionalisation and collective narcissism, empower-
ment of the people becomes synonymous with the restoration of the nation. Nationalism,
xenophobia and nativism thus provide common ideational foundations and discursive
tropes employed in the political rhetoric, electoral mobilisation strategies and policy
legitimation of right-wing populists. Populist appeals to nostalgic nationalism and col-
lective narcissism are thereby frequently gendered as return to an idealised patriarchal
space in time in which White heterosexual men enjoyed a dominant position of cultural
hegemony in politics, business, and society, unchallenged by women, ethnic minorities
or alternative sexual orientations and gender identities (Hakola et al., 2021; Cichocka
and Cislak, 2020). Hypermasculinity, appeals to White patriarchy, and a vulgar sexist
machismo were, for example, all signifying markers of Donald Trump’s populist style
and rhetorical repertoire that actively contributed to his popular appeal with his follow-
ers (Neville-Shephard and Neville-Shephard, 2020).
Finally, in exploring the various discursive and practical interactions between pop-
ulism, foreign policy and security, scholarship in IR and CSS has increasingly explored
interdisciplinary avenues beyond an exchange with populism studies, incorporating
insights from disciplines such as political communication and political psychology, for
example, in exploring the role of affective appeals in populist security narratives and how
populist demands for the restoration of national sovereignty target popular anxieties sur-
rounding the societal, cultural and economic impacts of globalisation, mass immigration
and structural demographic shifts (Browning, 2019; Holland and Fermor, 2021; Homolar
and Löfflmann, 2021). This includes research into the mobilising dynamics and policy
legitimation effects of affective appeals to nostalgic nationalism and the deliberate humil-
iation of the ‘real people’ populating the ‘heartland’ by a hostile establishment, popular
anxieties about social marginalisation and demographic displacement, and fear of alien
Others, in particular unauthorised migrants that are framed predominantly as violent
410 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 24(3)

criminals and terrorists in nationalist populist rhetoric (Hochschild, 2018; Jardina, 2019;
Norris and Ingelhart, 2019; Oliver and Rahn, 2016; Wuthnow, 2019). Populist humilia-
tion narratives reinforce a profound sense of ontological insecurity among nationalist
populist voters that can culminate in the legitimation of politically motivated violence
against an establishment represented as fundamentally hostile to the ‘will of the people’
(Homolar and Löfflmann, 2021). Violence becomes justified as deliberate act of resist-
ance against perceived injustices and the victimisation of the popular community by vil-
lainous elites. The violent potential of such populist mobilisation strategies was underlined
by the Capitol riot in the United States on 6 January 2021, where a violent mob of Trump
supporters sought to overturn the certification of the 2020 presidential election, an elec-
tion which Donald Trump had repeatedly and systematically reassured his followers had
been ‘stolen’ from them by the corrupt Washington establishment (Homolar and
Löfflmann, 2021). The study of traditional conceptualisations of national security in IR,
however, focuses predominantly on the material realm of geopolitics, military power and
grand strategy, largely ignoring questions of collective identity and domestic politics. In
examining the conceptual relationship between populism and security and its practical
manifestations, CSS scholarship, on the contrary, offers multiple points of connection as
the field has turned its attention increasingly to non-elitist perspectives and everyday
experiences of (in)security, the vernacular of ordinary people, and concepts of ontological
security in the social construction of identity (Gillespie and O’Loughlin, 2009; Steele and
Homolar, 2019; Stevens and Vaughan-Williams, 2018). In their work on vernacular secu-
rity, for example, Jarvis and Lister have pointed to the significance of a ‘bottom-up’ view
of security, which exists in opposition to elite articulations that ‘speak for, rather than to
(or, perhaps better, with) “ordinary” people and the conditions of (in)security they experi-
ence, encounter or construct in everyday life’ (Jarvis and Lister, 2013: 158, see also
Wojczewski, 2020). The research by Bonansinga, Kinnvall and Svensson, and Löfflmann
in this special issue accordingly centres on how the security imaginaries of different pop-
ulist leaders, parties and movements play a vital role in structuring their public perfor-
mance and political operation.
Populist security imaginaries correspond with existing avenues of inquiry while at the
same time occupying a conceptual space between the categories of ‘official/elite’ dis-
course and ‘popular/non-elite knowledge’ (Stevens and Vaughan-Williams, 2018: 16)
employed in CSS, thereby prompting a further conceptual, analytical, and methodologi-
cal development in the study of the social construction of security. Securitisation theory,
for example, examines the rhetorical construction and political performance of elite
speech acts and their respective audience reception (Booth, 2007; Buzan et al., 1998). The
conceptual space occupied by populist ‘outsiders’, who reject conventional norms of
political behaviour and communication, however, sits somewhat awkwardly with secu-
ritisation theory’s analytical model of discursive authority and legitimacy. Populist ‘inter-
ventions’ (Panizza, 2017: 415) aim to redraw the boundaries of political debate and public
discourse by redefining what is sayable and doable, and hence socially acceptable and
politically possible, reformulating the hegemonic political framework of meaning-mak-
ing and identity formation through a decidedly anti-elitist discursive performance of ordi-
nariness and authenticity designed to shock and disrupt the status quo. While the impact
of populism in traditional security areas such as counter-terrorism policy (Hall, 2020) and
grand strategy and national security (Löfflmann, 2019) has begun to draw more scholarly
attention, in particular in the US context, some CSS scholars have applied securitisation
theory to the speech acts, political rhetoric and aesthetics used by nationalist populist
leaders like Donald Trump, further developing securitisation approaches by applying a
Löfflmann 411

more carefully calibrated understanding of the role of audience interaction and the inter-
play of national and popular sovereignty in the construction of the Self in populist secu-
rity discourses and narratives (Fermor and Holland, 2020; Kurylo, 2020; Wojczewski,
2020). Examining the interplay of populism and security, Donatella Bonansinga thereby
contends that in the narrative construction of threat, left-wing populists engage in pro-
cesses of securitisation that are comparable with the discursive practices of the populist
right. Empirically, Bonansinga bases her argument on a qualitative content analysis of
key texts of the well-known French leftist populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his party La
France Insoumise, highlighting how left-wing populism challenges the existing security
order on multiple levels by interlinking both national elites and international bodies such
as the EU and NATO as sources of popular insecurity. As Bonansinga demonstrates, pop-
ulists across the political spectrum can use insecurity as an ideational resource to con-
struct the ‘people vs elite’ struggle as a relationship whereby the existence of the former
is threatened by the latter in a variety of ways. This questions the supposed primacy of
socio-economic arguments within left-wing populism.
Going beyond securitisation theory, two contributions in this special issue approach
the study of populism predominantly from the perspective of ontological security and
affective appeals to fear, anxiety and resentment. Discursive and narrative approaches in
IR and ontological security studies have conceptualised emotions as affective energies
and dynamics that can be analysed textually as specific content of political communica-
tion (Koschut et al., 2017; Ross, 2006). The study of discourse thereby includes both the
intertextuality and contextualisation of emotions on a macro-societal level and their co-
constitution among different producers and audiences as politically, socially and cultur-
ally relevant. The affective terms of political communication, that is, direct references to
feelings such as pride, joy, fear or hate, and ‘emotional connotations’ frame political
actors or policy issues in a distinctively positive or negative light, for example, in refer-
ring to ‘failed policies’ or ‘endless wars’ in populist rhetoric (Koschut et al., 2017: 483–
484). Catarina Kinnvall and Ted Svensson turn their attention here to voter mobilisation
by the populist far right. Incorporating insights from political psychology, Kinnvall and
Svensson identify the conceptual interlinkage of internal and external insecurities as hall-
mark of nationalist populist actors, while they are primarily interested in the psychologi-
cal and affective mechanisms underwriting this process, considering populism
predominantly as source of anxiety that manifests both transnationally and in the every-
day. Their analysis of the ontological insecurity, fantasy narratives and emotional govern-
ance of far-right populism is in particular centred on gendered and racialised narratives
and how these are fuelled by feelings of pride, shame, vulnerability and insecurity. Georg
Löfflmann’s analysis, on the contrary, focuses on the interlinkage of voter mobilisation
and policy legitimation in the populist security narratives employed by Donald Trump
and his nationalist populist vision of ‘America First’. Löfflmann argues that ‘America
First’ served a dual role of internal and external Othering, which elevated the internal
Other, the ‘enemy of the American people’ to an ontological status of equal or even supe-
rior standing to that of external threats to national security. Trump’s populist security
narratives simultaneously reframed the concept of the American Self around the particu-
lar insecurities and anxieties of his core supporters of White working-class and non-col-
lege-educated voters in the American heartland, legitimising an anti-globalist policy
agenda that actively sought to divide domestic audiences for political gain.
As this introduction suggests, populism’s discursive fluidity and relative flexibility
requires researchers to closely examine how any particular identity of the ‘people’ and
the ‘elite’ is socially constructed and politically defined. Populist politicians, parties
412 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 24(3)

and movements and their varying definitions of popular community, national sover-
eignty and insecurity operate through discursive and practical means that manifest both
domestically and internationally and they interlink both spheres in their appeals to vot-
ers and particular constituencies by imagining a hostile Other. Conceptually, this spe-
cial issue makes a strong case for incorporating insights from populism studies, political
communication, political psychology and adjacent field in political science in exploring
how populist communication, voter mobilisation and policy performances reframe the
international as source of profound insecurity, existential crisis and threat, and how this
identification simultaneously serves to forge a close ideational and affective connection
between populists and their constituencies in the context of domestic politics.
Empirically, the analysis of populism in IR contained in this special issue covers a wide
empirical and geographic spectrum, from the international and transnational framing of
populist discourses and common ideational and ideological resources, to the use of
specific national strategies and populist narratives to legitimate individual foreign pol-
icy choices, ranging from militarised border security and immigration restrictions to
trade protectionism and strategic geopolitical realignments. The authors collected here
explore some of the most significant populist disruptions of the international status quo
in recent times, including the presidency of Donald Trump in the United States, Brexit
and the premiership of Boris Johnson and the global rise of nationalist populist govern-
ments located on the far-right, ranging from India and Turkey to Hungary and Brazil.
They offer a variety of analytical frameworks and empirical findings that provide a
more comprehensive understanding of the different iterations of populism and its var-
iegated political effects and international interactions. In presenting this research on the
study of populism in IR, we hope to make transparent not only where and how various
populisms connect, but crucially where populists differ and compete in their formula-
tion of collective identities, the implementation of policy and their conceptualisation of
the international sphere itself.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the reviewers and editors at BJPIR for their helpful comments and feedback on this intro-
duction and all their support for this project along the way, and in particular give special thanks to all the
authors, who contributed to this special issue with their manuscripts, attendance at our workshop, and by provid-
ing valuable feedback on colleagues’ work.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article: The research for this article was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship
(ECF-2017-545).

ORCID iD
Georg Löfflmann https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2502-9777

Note
1. Empirically, the contributions in this special issue are mainly concerned with right-wing, authoritarian, or
nationalist populism; its role in the international system and its study in international relations (IR). Where
the basic term ‘populism’ is used, it refers to an antagonistic discourse that separates society between
the ‘real people’ and the ‘corrupt elite’. The more specific populist articulations and constructions of the
popular community and the various categories of ‘enemies of the people’ they apply will be designated
as ‘nationalist populism’/‘right-wing populism’ and ‘left-wing populism’/‘progressive populism,’ respec-
tively, in this introduction.
Löfflmann 413

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