Beyond “Populism”: The Psychodynamics of Antipolitical Popular Movements

I argue here that the term “populism” captures too much, including movements that are enthralled by a fantasied ideal as well as genuine movements for plural and popular sovereignty. The term is too often used to deride all popular movements, but this is to the detriment of genuinely political and democratic movements for democratic sovereignty. I distinguish popular movements that are genuinely political and generative from those that are regressive and anti-political. The latter, I argue using psychoanalytic theory, are melancholically clinging to a lost Thing, while democratic popular movements are open to creating new societies. To explore these differences I draw on Lacan and Klein whose theories point to the need for creatively working to create new collective identities rather than melancholically clinging to old ones.

Popular Education as a collective practice of insurgency and emancipation

This article investigates the original meanings of the term popular education in Latin America, whose polysemy acquired along the historical process imposes inaccuracies and obstacles to the educational debate. The guiding thread of the article is an interview with Carlos Rodrigues Brandão, for whom popular education is the work and militancy of a “thinking community”, which aims at a revolutionary process, whose liberation is the first matter of an education that is not characterized only by addressing the popular class. The origin of this tradition in the context of the 1960s, first in the effervescence of Latin American popular movements and revolutions, and then organized as resistance and fight against dictatorships, places this popular education as an insurgent practice, of organization and confrontation against the State. The text is one of the results of a research carried out through historiographic and bibliographic study, as well as interviews and conversations conducted with popular educators.

Dying against Democracy: Suicide Protest and the 1905 Anti-American Boycott

The joint rise of popular movements and mass media in early twentieth-century China gave birth to a democratic imagination, which culminated in the anti-American boycott of 1905. The transnational campaign nonetheless disintegrated as a result of partisan division—an ingrained predicament of democratic agonism that is best illustrated by the story of Feng Xiawei, a grassroots activist whose suicide in Shanghai constituted a key moment in the boycott. Juxtaposing a variety of accounts about Feng's death in journalism, political fiction, reformed opera, and advertisements, this article examines how, together, these texts construct democratic agonism and suicide protest as revealing two opposing political sensibilities as well as modes of action. Instead of expressing only nationalist passion, Feng's suicide reveals a deep anxiety of his time to locate a spiritual source of authority in the face of its glaring absence in social negotiation. This fraught dynamic between the democratic and the transcendent continues to characterize modern Chinese political culture to the present.

Democracy, elite power and civil society: Bolivia and Peru compared

Despite proximity and cultural similarities, Peru and Bolivia provide contrasting examples of elite power as opposed to that of popular movements. Peru in recent years has seen the consolidation of business power at the expense of a politically active civil society; opposition to neoliberal policies has been fragmented and weak. Bolivia has a history of strong social movements that underpinned successive administrations by the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). However, these trajectories are not fixed and the ability of civil society and elites to control the state fluctuates. The November 2019 coup in Bolivia is a reminder of this. This article compares the two countries over different time periods: that of state-led development prior to 1980, the neoliberal period in the 1980s and 1990s, and that of post-neoliberalism period after 2000.

Pilgrims and Missionaries of Social Peace: Geneva and Pontigny as Sites of Scandinavian Internationalism in Late Interwar Europe

This article investigates two interlinked sites of Scandinavian socialist internationalism in continental Europe: the Nordic folk high school in Geneva and the humanistic centre created by French philosopher Paul Desjardins in Pontigny. Locating and situating these two nodes on the cultural-political map of late interwar Europe allows for a study of how actors from the popular movements in Denmark, Norway and Sweden mobilised educational ideals and practices to internationalise the experience of Scandinavian social democracy. The analysis shows how the transnational activities of the Nordic folk high school’s study course opened up new spaces for Scandinavian internationalism. In this way, the article argues, the school represented an experiment in internationalism from below where Nordism was deployed as a cultural strategy to create international understanding for working-class Scandinavians; and created new arenas for Nordic encounters with French political and intellectual milieus that admired Scandinavian democracy and social peace.