The Many Contexts of Radicalism, Populism, and Extremism: From the Local to the Transnational

This section offers a forum for scholars working on radical, populist, and extremist challengers of democracy. Embracing theoretical and methodological pluralism, it will gather panels and papers focusing on diverse issues, including antidemocratic and antipluralist discourses and ideologies, individual-level attitudes, party and movement action forms, organization, and strategies, as well as the impact of political mobilizations on and beyond the ‘mainstream’. Recent decades have seen the ‘mainstreaming’ and normalization of various forms of political radicalism and extremism across the globe. In the process, notions of place have become increasingly salient in the scholarly debate on the antidemocratic and antipluralist challenges to democracy. Today, populist actors exercise pressure not only on national parliaments, but on all levels of political decision-making: from local to regional and from national to supranational contexts. Radical actors have diversified, and now involve a broad array of organizational forms that campaign at different levels of democratic polities. At the same time, scholars have noted the spread of extremist attitudes within and across populations, marked by important regional and national variations. Crucially, the different levels of radical, populist, and extremist mobilizations interact in manifold ways, raising new research questions of whether and how local, national, and global issues, forms of action, and strategies impact each other through ‘upscaling’ and ‘downscaling’. Clearly, processes of globalization have strongly impacted such actors, for instance visible in the adoption of new issues and strategies around the climate crisis, COVID-19, gender politics, and new and old geopolitical conflicts. Concurrently, local disputes around issues, such as infrastructure, migrant housing, or energy policies, are often embedded in modes of the ‘glocal’ political economy and uneven development, and together with other local(ised) grievances, they have given rise to a highly polarized rural-urban divide, around which antidemocratic and antipluralist actors construct emotional appeals. Moreover, the challengers to democracy gain increasing traction around antiglobalist discourses and the continued questioning of international organizations, such as the European Union and the United Nations, posing challenges to international collaboration and alliance-building.