Epistemic Wars of Position: The Making of the Global Right Counter- Epistemic Bloc

Contemporary culture wars are most often theorised as conflicts over values, identities, or moral attitudes. This paper argues that such approaches overlook a deeper transformation: culture wars increasingly function as epistemic wars of position, organised struggles over the production, validation, and institutionalisation of knowledge. Dominant value-change and cultural backlash paradigms, while analytically powerful, are limited by a methodological empiricism that stabilises a sociological ontology in which beliefs appear as measurable preferences rather than as contested regimes of truth structured by power. To address this limitation, the paper introduces several concepts, chiefly epistemic blocs, to capture how political actors coordinate struggles over epistemic authority across institutions such as education, academia, media, and law. It argues that the contemporary “Global Right” seeks not merely to oppose liberal democratic policies but to contest the liberal–secular epistemic bloc itself, including its ontological premises and modes of knowledge production. Conflicts over gender and sexuality emerge as privileged sites of this struggle, where mechanisms of political linkage (supply side) and social closure (demand side) work together to consolidate counter-hegemonic “anti-woke” narratives. The paper empirically examines the radical-right party Chega and its cooperation with a Portuguese-Brazilian conservative social movement. It demonstrates how these actors function as nodes within transnational networks that link politicians, intellectuals, clergy and activists. Through seminars, training programmes and pedagogical initiatives, they influence schools, curricula and universities as contested epistemic arenas. They portray liberal education as indoctrination while They advance alternative truth claims. Crucially, the analysis demonstrates that these actors strategically adopt the grammar of the secular-liberal order to enhance their own epistemic legitimacy. The paper conceptualises this strategy as epistemic hybridisation. Through this Through this hybrid strategy, the examined actors seek not merely to contest policy outcomes, but also to reconstitute the conditions of truth and authority in pursuit of a post-liberal political order.