Strategies of Hegemonization: Culture War and Epistemic Authority Creation in Comparative Populist Politics

With the populist turn in the current political era, there has been an increasing conflict over symbols, values, and norms. Culture has become a site of contestation and “culture war” has become an expression of this contestation in the political (in Hungary, e.g., Békés 2020) as well as the academic sphere (cf. Kristóf 2021). Populist leaders, such as Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Narendra Modi of India, have sought to bring institutional transformations in the cultural domain either with the creation of parallel institutions or by attempting at conquering or reorienting the field. This has been part of the strategy of hegemonization which seeks to re-orient the academic and education fields into an ideological basket of the right, which in turn can play a significant role in identity constructions and epistemic authority-building (e.g., nationalist discourses of history, anti-gender discourses). Following Gramscian and post-structuralist analysis, the paper aims to investigate the strategies of hegemonization by Orbán and Modi in Hungary and India respectively. Within the hegemonization process, the paper will explore how a populist regime can build and reshape discourses, and respective ideological content because cultural wars are also discursive wars (Zecchini 2019). A focus will also be on institutions (mainstream, alternative or parallel institutions), and how the populist hegemonization strategy looks at reshaping discourses and institutions in a comparative context. The paper also seeks to explore a framework for theorizing cultural war in academia based domains on the intensity of conflicts and polarization. References Békés, Márton. 2020. Kulturális hadviselés: A kulturális hatalom elmélete és gyakorlata. [Cultural Warfare: The Theory and Practice of Cultural Power.] Budapest, K.K.T.T.K. Alapítvány. Kristóf, Luca. 2021. Kultúrcsaták: Kulturális elit és politika a mai Magyarországon. [Culture Battles: Cultural Elite and Politics in Contemporary Hungary.] Budapest, Gondolat. Zecchini, Laetitia. 2019. "On Communities of Sentiments, Competing Vulnerabilities and Cultural Wars" in Emotions, Mobilisations and South Asian Politics, ed. Blom, Amélie and Lama-Rewal, Stéphanie Taw. New Delhi, Routledge. 243-263.