do not intend to produce a knowledge that is merely particular, as if our double condition as women and as Latin American means that we can only speak to local and specific problems. Very much to the contrary, our commitment is to attempt to grasp what is universalizable – in the sense of a situated universalism – in the problems, challenges, and responses offered by a locus of enunciation like Latin America within the emancipatory production of knowledge in the Global South and Global North. We are convinced that epistemic decolonization also involves understanding that local problems demand global solutions through the construction of egalitarian academic spaces for debating transformative ideas.
That said, it is worth noting that, when we began to work on populism, the political context in Latin America was broadly favorable to anti-neoliberal, egalitarian, and inclusive discourses geared toward the expansion of rights. The Social Democratic Party (PSD) in Portugal had also been reinvented; experiences like those of SYRIZA, Podemos, and La France Insoumise were born; and a curious popular liberalism had been reactivated in the cases of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, who were fighting for plebeian and egalitarian alternatives in Europe and North America. But since then, and as our research on populism moved forward, the political situation took a major step backward. The ebb of populist experiences in Latin America brought with it the rise of neoliberal governments that not only sought virulently to disarm the egalitarian accomplishments of populism, but also targeted the fundamental premises of the rule of law and democratic coexistence. Latin America has become a political laboratory for testing out different forms of post-democratic life for the capitalism of the future. This translates into disarming our institutional structure through the irresponsible acquisition of foreign debt to the International Monetary Fund or private investment funds, the acceleration of paradoxically democratic soft coups,1 the judicial persecution and imprisonment of popular leaders through rigged proceedings, political experiments based on dehistoricization, new age philosophies, and social coaching, and the alarming rise in the systematic murder of social activists. Regarding soft coups, it is worth highlighting the recent coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia during the most recent presidential elections in 2019, and the institutional coup perpetrated against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The latter strategy was accompanied by the imprisonment of Lula Da Silva through a corrupt judicial proceeding, and the murder of feminist and lesbian social leader and Rio de Janeiro city councilor Marielle Franco – all amplified by the electoral victory that brought an overtly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic leader such as Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency. But we should also mention the opacity of the judicial proceedings that led to the imprisonment of indigenous social leader Milagro Sala in the Jujuy Province of Argentina in 2016, and the systematic persecution of figures such as Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina and Rafael Correa in Ecuador as soon as their presidential terms had ended.2 However, this judicialization and criminalization of politics has also crossed the border to countries not considered populist. We could point to the reactivation of far-right and guerrilla positions in Colombia – bordering an exhausted Venezuela – through the rejection of the peace referendum; the election of far-right leader Iván Duque; the resumption of the murder of social movement leaders; the judicial persecution of popular political leaders such as Gustavo Petro, Francia Márquez, and Ángela María Robledo; and the rearmament of guerrillas, faced with a lack of protection and the murder of demobilized ex-guerrillas.3
Winds have also shifted in Europe. At the same time that SYRIZA, Podemos, and La France Insoumise showed their limitations and came up against difficulties beginning in 2018, xenophobic and racist discourses were on the rise. Thus, strong electoral performances by the likes of Marine Le Pen in France in 2017 and governments of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey were joined by Matteo Salvini in Italy and the emergence of the Vox party in Spain. All of these represent agendas seeking, on the one hand, to roll back the collective accomplishments of feminism, of black, indigenous, and LGBTI+ communities and, on the other, to uphold traditional values like the family, property, and the irresponsible exploitation of nature. To this, we must also add Donald Trump’s victory in the United States and his resolute determination to embrace this same agenda, to once again intervene in Latin American politics, to humiliate the European Union, and to declare a trade war on China. Although these examples do not exhaust the ways in which various reactionary or borderline reactionary positions have gained ground globally, they serve to illustrate the context in which our work and our theoretical–political concerns have unfolded. In any case, and in parallel to these advances by the right, we have also seen the victory of Alberto Fernández in Argentina; the reactivation of the progressive wing of the Citizens’ Revolution in Ecuador; the persistence of Humane Colombia’s pact for life, peace, and the environment; the consolidation of women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States and Francia Márquez in Colombia; the silent success of the Portuguese government and the pact between Podemos and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) in Europe; the victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico; and the regional consolidation of a powerful popular feminist movement known as Not One Less.
Now, the current global scenario that we just described demands that we take up a series of questions not contemplated in classical debates on populist theory. We refer to debates on the opposition between left-wing and right-wing populisms and their relationship with neo-fascism, the emancipatory nature (or lack thereof) of populist projects, their ability to provide a true and lasting alternative to neoliberalism, the link between populism and institutions from the perspective of a popular and emancipatory state, the intersection between populism and plebeian republicanism, the potential for international populist solidarity, and, above all, the need for a fruitful dialogue between populism and popular feminist movements that are confronting patriarchal forms of power, property, and collective sacrifice. Toward this end, we found it much more suggestive to write seven theses on populism – each addressing a specific problem or position – rather than attempting to establish a unified and free-standing corpus. So the reader is not obligated to follow a specific reading order but can instead approach each of the theses independently, according to a web of concrete problems in each case. This is, therefore, an open book, whose subterranean connections between different sections, far from being exhausted by a unitary reading, make room for the uncertainty that each problem poses and the hope that the reader will be able to connect these problems according to their particular interests.
On the other hand, we should note that this book is also the result of a process of collective experience and organization. We could perhaps say that it has been weaving together ever since those initial investigations into populism that we each undertook alongside other researchers, leading to the publication of a groundbreaking book about Kirchnerist populism,4 a study of the relationship between populism and republicanism,5 and its incorporation into contemporary philosophical, political, and historical debates from different contexts.6 But, above all, we must mention that this militant project would not have been possible without the field of study opened up by Ernesto Laclau’s epistemic turn and later contributions by Chantal Mouffe and Jorge Alemán. Nor would it have been possible without the establishment of spaces such as the Ernesto Laclau Open Seminar at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), the various projects and open discussion spaces at FLACSO-Ecuador, and the Theorising Transnational Populist Politics project funded by the British Academy.7
All of these spaces not only allowed the two of us to think together, but also brought together an extraordinary group of colleagues from different continents, both from the politically engaged academic community and from political life. Among them, we would like to thank Sofía Argüello, Javier Balsa, Luis Blengino, Ricardo Camargo Brito, Manuel Canelas, Germán Cano, Volkan Çıdam, Valeria Coronel, Mark Devenney, Allan Dreyer-Hansen, José Enrique Emma López, Íñigio Errejón, José Figueroa, Jorge Foa Torres, Javier Franzé, Zeynep Gambetti, Adoración Guamán, Julio Guanche, Gustavo Guille, Jenny Gunnarsson-Payne, Griselda Gutiérrez, Emma Ingala, María Cecilia Ipar, Andy Knott, Jorge Lago, Anthony Leaker, Juan Pablo Lichtmajer, Oliver Marchart, Sammuele Mazzolini, Emilia Palonen, Gloria Perelló, German Primera Villamizar, Clara Ramas, Franklin Ramírez, Eduardo Rinesi, Anayra Santory, Ian Sinclair, Yannis Stavrakakis, Soledad Stoessel, Ailynn Torres Santana, José Luis Villacañas, and Clare Woodford, among others. These are the kinds of friends
