I am happy to announce that my co-authored article (with Emmy Eklundh & Thorsten Wojczewski) “Left Populism and Foreign Policy: Bernie Sanders and Podemos” has just been published *OPEN ACCESS* in International Affairs (https://buff.ly/4cX25Fk).
In the paper, we do three things: (1) We provide a critique of previous research on populism in IR. Although IR scholars have made significant progress in more systematically approaching populism and its potential effect on international politics and foreign policy, significant shortcomings remain. Most importantly, there is still a tendency to (involuntarily) incorporate aspects of related phenomena like nationalism or nativism into the populism definition, risking to misattribute effects of the former to the latter. (2) We propose a Laclauian conception of populism (Essex School) that shifts attention away from populism’s alleged effects to how framing issues in terms of a critique of elites and a call for popular sovereignty makes them appear more legitimate. (3) We illustrate the limitations of conventional IR populism approaches drawing on two brief case studies on Bernie Sanders and Podemos to show that there is no universal populist essence that could have an effect on foreign policy. In contrast to the claim by prior research that populists (not the far right) are sceptical of international organization, multilateralism, and immigration, we show that at least Sanders and Podemos propagate an openly internationalist, multilateral and pro-immigration foreign policy. Populism simply lacks the political substance to have an effect.
The article is part of a broader special issue on “The effects of global populism” edited by Daniel Wajner and Sandra Destradi, so check that out as well.