29/10/21. Dr Cillian Mc Bride, Queen’s University Belfast.
“Populism and the Politics of Recognition.”
Abstract
Populists have, with some success, appropriated the notion of cultural recognition to present themselves as champions of the unrecognised and the left-behind. In keeping with the long established cultural recognition model, populists present themselves as suffering from a recognition deficit which must be remedied as a matter of justice. This paper advances an alternative reading of populist recognition politics, and the politics of recognition more generally, which focuses on the authority relations involved in struggles for recognition. This analyses, firstly, social groups as themselves the product of a recognition struggles. Secondly, an appreciation of the way claims to social recognition demand the transformation of social relations rather than the simple affirmation of social identities. Thirdly, the anger and resentment which is a hallmark of populist recognition politics is interpreted not as a response to injustice but as an authoritarian response to resistance to the populist vision of the social order. This alternative recognition analysis of populism suggests that existing models of recognition politics are fundamentally apolitical and that a more thoroughly political understanding of recognition is necessary.