Populists have lately been at the forefront of securitisation processes, yet little attention has been paid to the relationship between populism and securitisation. This paper investigates the role of securitisation in populism, exploring how the populist mode of securitising differs from traditional securitisation processes. It argues that securitisation is inherently embedded in populism which embodies a particular style of securitisation with a distinct set of discursive and aesthetic repertoires. The populist invocation of societal security and their claim to defend the fundamentally precarious identity of ‘the endangered people’ necessitate an unceasing construction of new threats. Aiming to discredit ‘elitist’ securitisation processes, populism invests in a specific construction of the referent object, the securitising actor and their relationship to the audience. The populist securitising style also carries a distinctive aesthetic centred on ‘poor taste’, sentimental ordinariness and unprofessionalism, examining which can widen our understanding of the aesthetics of security.
This paper reanimates the Adorno-Benjamin debate to investigate the potential of contemporary technologised consumer culture to become a space for bottom-up political agency and resistance. For both Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, the technological advancement of the twentieth century had an inherently irrational character, as evidenced by the self-destructive tendencies of humanity during the Second World War. Nonetheless, the thinkers famously disagreed when it came to the implications of the marriage between technology and mass culture. Discerning its potential for the mobilisation of the masses, Benjamin believed that technology would politicise mass culture, allowing society to employ it for its political endsan idea which Adorno debunked. Technologised consumer culture has noticeably evolved since the time of the debate. Nevertheless, revisiting the debate is necessary to understand a sharp contradiction between the expanded possibilities for political participation and the return of the 'auratic' or cultic function of technologised consumer culture. At the same time, the paper shows that technology does politicise consumer culture. However, the pitfall lies in that the politicisation is done through technology as a tool, which is vulnerable to appropriation, granting those who are in the position to control it a substantial political resource. Consequently, the paper argues that the politicisation of consumer culture risks having a reverse effect of facilitating the aestheticising of politicsturning politics into a spectacle. Keywords Technology, consumer culture, the Adorno-Benjamin debate, politicisation, resistance contemporary technologised consumer culture to become a space for bottom-up political agency and resistance. Indeed, if consumerism is so deeply entrenched into the fabric of modern society, one way to deal with it could be to employ technologised consumer culture for the political empowerment of the masses. In so doing, the paper examines the possibility of, using Benjamin's term, politicisation of consumer culture through its interaction with technology. The paper proceeds as follows. First, it reconstructs the two sides of the debate. Benjamin's insights into the decline of 'the aura' and the transformation of art into a vehicle of political communication are counterpoised with an exegesis of Adorno's critique. In dealing with the debate, the most important is to avoid approaching it from the position of who is right or wrong. As the following section illustrates, the debate reflects the ambiguity of contemporary technologised consumer culture, with its simultaneously progressive and regressive potentiality. On the one hand, in addition to endowing consumers with an agency, the new developments have provided unprecedented possibilities for social communication. On the other, their consumption is an investment into the structures, which, on a wider scale, disempower society. The contradictory nature of technologised consumer culture accounts for the combination of a 'progressive' prosum...
IR scholarship has recently seen a burgeoning interest in the right-wing populist politics of security, showing that it tends to align with the international ultraconservative mobilisation against ‘gender ideology’. In contrast, this article investigates how local feminist actors can resist right-wing populist constructions of (in)security by introducing counter-populist discourses and aesthetics of security. I analyse the case of Poland, which presents two competing populist performances of (in)security: the Independence March organised by right-wing groups on Poland's Independence Day and the Women's Strike protests against the near-total ban on abortion. The article draws on Judith Butler's theory of the performative politics of public assembly, which elucidates how the political subject of ‘the people’ can emerge as bodies come together to make security demands through both verbal and non-verbal acts. I argue that the feminist movement used the vehicle of populist performance to subvert the exclusionary constructions of (in)security by right-wing populists. In the process, it introduced a different conception of security in the struggle for a ‘livable life’. The study expands the understanding of the relationship between populism, security and feminism in IR by exploring how the populist politics of security is differently enacted by everyday agents in local contexts.
The rise of state dissidence has challenged the hegemony of Western liberalism on the international relations stage. Russia's ongoing involvement in the Ukraine crisis is a case in point. Russia's dissidence threatens not only the already fragile European order, but also the potency of liberalism as a system of international norms. Hence, a great deal of attention has been given to trying to determine the possible failures and solutions of global governance in dealing with Russia. In contrast, this article argues for the need to understand state resistance from the perspective of the dissenting state. By drawing upon Carl Schmitt's influential critique of globalizing liberalism, the article attempts to analyse what Russia's resistance reveals about the subtle mechanisms of global liberal governance. On the basis of Schmitt's theory, the article establishes that Russia's dissidence can be an attempt to preserve state sovereignty and its unique "way of life", as well as state pluralism on the global arena. In fact, to eradicate conflict, liberal governance attempts to suppress state pluralism as a potential cause of conflict. In the long run, however, this risks provoking radical resistance in response. The article then analyses the "hybrid" strategy of Russia's resistance employed in the Ukraine crisis, based on which it identifies the major weaknesses of liberal governance. The article concludes that the inadequacy of international law to deal with unconventional forms of warfare and refusal to acknowledge the possibility of animosity can significantly debilitate liberal governance. This article is published as part of a collection on global governance.
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