Populism and the affective politics of humiliation narratives

This article examines how communicative practices, emotion, and everyday experiences of insecurity interlink in processes of populist political mobilization. Combining insights from international security studies, political psychology, and populism research, it demonstrates how populist political agents from the right of the political spectrum have constructed a powerful security imaginary around the loss of past national greatness that creates affinities with the experiences of those who feel disempowered and ties existential anxieties to concerns with immigration, globalization, and integration. As we show, within the populist security imaginary, humiliation is the key discursive mechanism that helps turn abstract notions of enmity into politically consequential affective narratives of loss, betrayal, and oppression. Humiliation binds together an ostensibly conflicting sense of national greatness and victimhood to achieve an emotive response that enables a radical departure from established domestic and international policy norms and problematizes policy choices centered on collaboration, dialogue, and peaceful conflict resolution