Conceptualising backlash politics: Introduction to a special issue on backlash politics in comparison

Alter, Karen J.; Zürn, Michael

doi:10.1177/1369148120947958

Cited by 54 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Actors seeking to avoid ontological insecurity and dissonance find comfort in a return to even more fortified self-narratives and increased distancing to difference. Thus, ontological insecurity and dissonance consequently may drive an identity backlash, meaning a mobilisation of resistance to changes in self-narratives (Alter and Zurn 2020), in a way that thwarts the goals of recognition.…”

Section: Recognition Ontological (In)security and Identity Backlashmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agonistic recognition as a remedy for identity backlash: insights from Israel and Turkey

Strömbom

Rumelili

2021

Third World Quarterly

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While an extensive part of the conflict transformation literature stresses the importance of transforming the identities of conflict parties through recognition, it fails to recognise the propensity of such transformations to generate ontological insecurity and dissonance, and consequently a possible backlash towards antagonistic identities. Drawing on agonistic thought, we develop a conception of agonistic recognition, premised on non-finalism, pluralist multilogue and disaggregated recognition. We suggest that these elements of agonistic recognition may guard against the development of ontological insecurity and dissonance in recognition processes. We comparatively analyse the connections and tensions between recognition, ontological insecurity/ dissonance and identity backlash experienced during the transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the context of the Oslo Peace Process in the 1990s and Turkey's 'rapprochement' with Greece in the context of its EU accession process in the 2000s. We also assess the presence of the elements of agonistic recognition in these two conflict transformation processes. Our contribution constitutes an important step towards the specification of agonistic peace in terms of its underlying recognition processes and in developing the empirical study of agonistic elements in actual conflict transformation processes.

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Section: Recognition Ontological (In)security and Identity Backlashmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agonistic recognition as a remedy for identity backlash: insights from Israel and Turkey

Strömbom

Rumelili

2021

Third World Quarterly

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“…Status insecurity, anxiety, and frustration is not, of course, a necessary condition for backlash movements (Alter and Zürn, 2020a, this issue). Likewise, while concern for status quite evidently drives both the behaviour of individuals, and states – ignoring, for the moment, questions of degree or variation – not all status anxieties or frustrations will take on the characteristics of backlash movements.…”

Section: Status Anxiety Loss and The Politics Of Backlashmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The concept of retrograde, with its aim of ‘returning to a prior condition’, is essential to Alter and Zürn’s (2020a, this issue) definition of backlash politics. 10 Status loss, meanwhile, provides not only an emotive trigger, but a useful rhetorical trigger as well, for entrepreneurs of backlash politics to construct the past, and thus its reclamation, as fundamentally better than the present.…”

Section: Status Anxiety Loss and The Politics Of Backlashmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Alter and Zürn (2020a, this issue) define backlash politics ‘as a particular form of political contestation’ that has entered public discourse, and seeks to challenge dominant scripts through extraordinary goals, claims, and tactics, in service of a retrograde objective. While all of these are ‘jointly necessary elements’ for explaining whether a movement triggers backlash politics, the retrograde objective – this desire to recover the past, whether actual, or imagined – is the goal from which all other elements follow (Alter and Zürn, 2020a, this issue). Precisely why past political and social orders are deemed superior to the present is context dependent, as Alter and Zürn’s (2020a, this issue) myriad examples, and the other contributors to this special issue, illustrate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Alter and Zürn (2020a, this issue) explain, backlash entrepreneurs may well ‘tap into the psychology of individuals through emotive appeals’ in aid and defence of their movements. What allows status to be a powerful driver of state behaviour, meanwhile, also allows status anxiety, and narratives of status loss, to be manipulated and deployed by entrepreneurs of backlash movements in the pursuit of other goals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Back of the queue: Brexit, status loss, and the politics of backlash

Freedman

2020

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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Status anxiety is not a necessary condition for backlash movements, and yet, both are highly complementary. Across political levels, from the community and state to the international system, status anxiety is often cited as a principal grievance and motivator of backlash politics. This article challenges the basic premise behind this framing by arguing that status loss – as a subset of status anxiety – and backlash politics, are essentially co-constitutive phenomena. Status loss can certainly propel backlash movements to form, but claims of status loss and decline are also uniquely exploitable mechanisms for bringing backlash movements into existence. Rather than treat objective status loss as an obvious cause of backlash movements, then, this article switches the focus to how subjective narratives of status loss are constructed, promoted, retrieved, and contested, in order to either advance, or oppose, the cause of backlash entrepreneurs. Doing so illustrates a primary mechanism of backlash politics, but also a primary mechanism of status loss, challenging dominant intrinsic and material premises on the role of status in international relations. This discussion is illustrated through a focus on Britain’s 2016 referendum on the European Union, and the extent to which both Leave and Remain campaigners elevated the rhetoric of status loss in defence of alternative pasts, presents, and futures.

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Alienation and Contemporary Social Movements

Langman¹

2022

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements

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For Karl Marx, in his writings on alienation, workers not only suffered from the objective realities of poverty, squalor, and poor health, but, neither owning their tools nor the products of their labor sold for wages, were alienated, estranged from themselves, their full human potentials, and Nature. They were powerless, without freedom. They were denied recognition, objectified, rendered dehumanized things, simply costs of production. Marx expected such conditions would lead to mass mobilizations to overthrow capitalism. But by the time the 1844 Manuscripts had been discovered in the 1920s, capitalists, responding to worker's actions, pressures, and demands, had provided higher wages, along with benefits and entitlements that quelled working‐class discontents. Then came eclectic powered tools and machines, interchangeable parts, and continuous assembly lines enabling mass production that, pioneered by Ford, came to be known as “Fordism.” Better wages for workers enabled mass consumption, workers could own cars, however modest, and the “new” electric appliances; revolutionary fervor waned.

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Conceptualising backlash politics: Introduction to a special issue on backlash politics in comparison

Cited by 54 publications

References 44 publications

Agonistic recognition as a remedy for identity backlash: insights from Israel and Turkey

Agonistic recognition as a remedy for identity backlash: insights from Israel and Turkey

Back of the queue: Brexit, status loss, and the politics of backlash

Alienation and Contemporary Social Movements

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