Rethinking Civil Resistance in the Face of Rightwing Populism: A Theoretical Inquiry

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine some theoretical limitations potentially undermining civil resistance campaigns countering rightwing populism, and suggests how we might rethink the politics of nonviolent struggle. It argues that protests against rightwing populism have generally tackled the ‘supply side’ of populism or populist leaders. However, little attention has been paid to the ‘demand side’, which explains why constituents vote for populists. Increasing support for populist leaders reflects a collective perception that established political institutions are not living up to the expectations of ordinary people. In response to rightwing populism, civil resistance movements will need to engage two fronts of the struggle. The first is economic inequality perpetuated by a neoliberal order against which rightwing populists claim to defend the ‘people’. The second front entails a cultural reconstruction of the notion of the ‘people’ in response to cultural anxiety that has given ground to populist nativist discourses. This article proposes that both of these tasks require a conceptual reconfiguration of nonviolent resistance regarding power and culture.

Keywords:

• populism
• rightwing
• civil resistance
• neoliberalism
• culture
• identity

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It should be noted that some of these events started out as peaceful and developed into vandalism. See CBS (2016).

2 For crowd estimate data on the Women’s March, see Pressman and Chenoweth (2018).

3 Prior to the presidential election, a video clip was leaked, containing Trump’s 2005 vulgar comments about women which included ‘when you’re a star … you can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy’.

4 There are, of course, commentaries about civil resistance in the age of neoliberalism (see, for example, Lawrence 2013). But what is missing is systemically academic treatment of this topic, which at times leads to critiques that civil resistance is ideologically compliant with neoliberalism. See, for example, Chabot and Sharifi (2013b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janjira Sombatpoonsiri

JANJIRA SOMBATPOONSIRI is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University, Thailand. She is author of Humor and Nonviolent Struggle in Serbia (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2015), and currently an associate fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA).