Populism and Re-territorialization of Politics

With the rise of populist and illiberal actors, territorial disputes have become a key site where domestic moral polarisation meets international politics. This paper asks if and how populism further territorialises politics. It proceeds in three steps. First, a conceptual inquiry argues that even “minimal” populism (people-centrism and anti-elitism) entails a spatial project: it anchors “the people” in a morally charged heartland, intensifies bordering practices, and treats popular sovereignty as necessarily territorial. Second, I test whether these spatial claims translate into measurable geopolitical contention. To that end, I use executive populist discourse scores from the Global Populism Dataset with territorial armed conflict data from the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset. Across models, higher populism is positively associated with both the frequency and, more strongly, the intensity of territorial conflict. Third, to explain the mechanism, the paper introduces “populist geonarratives”: schematic stories, affectively charged histories, and epistemic claims that spatially organise the world into friends of “the people” and accomplices of corrupt elites. I develop a typology, yielding four ideal types: insulation, restoration, resistance, and reclamation. A within-case study of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan shows how neo-Ottomanism, the Turkish populist geonarrative, fuses civilisational pride with anti-imperialist grievance to reactivate the Treaties of Sèvres and Lausanne as unfinished struggles, legitimating cross-border interventions and maritime claims while reinforcing domestic authority. By foregrounding territory as a narrative resource and a conflict escalator, the paper complements accounts of illiberalism that focus on institutional change or ideological diffusion. It also speaks to debates on transnational illiberal politics by showing how geonarratives can enable selective international alignments yet constrain durable cooperation through intensified sovereignty claims over contested spaces.