Aurelien Mondon

Articulations of Islamophobia: From the Extreme to the Mainstream?

ABSTRACT This article will examine the construction and functions of, as well as relationship between, the diverse and changing articulations of Islamophobia. The aim is to contribute to debates about the definition of Islamophobia, which have tended to be contextually specific, fixed and/or polarized between racism and religious prejudice, between extreme and mainstream, state and non-state versions or undifferentiated, and offer a more nuanced framework to: (a) delineate articulations of Islamophobia as opposed to precise types and categories; (b) highlight the porosity in the discourse between extreme articulations widely condemned in the mainstream, and normalized and insidious ones, which the former tend to render more acceptable in comparison; (c) map where these intersect in response to events, historical and political conditions and new ideological forces and imperatives and (d) compare these articulations of Islamophobia in two contexts, France and the US.

The French secular hypocrisy: the extreme right, the Republic and the battle for hegemony

ABSTRACT The success of the extreme right in France in the past two decades has not been limited to its electoral rise. A more long-lasting victory has taken place in the ideological field, where the discourse of the extreme right now occupies a prominent place in the mainstream liberal democratic agenda. Increasingly, its ideas are seen in the media and in the platforms of mainstream parties as ‘common sense’ or at least acceptable. The growing acceptance of this ‘common sense’ is the result of very carefully crafted strategies put in place by extreme-right thinkers since the 1980s. For over three decades now, in order to change perceptions and renew extreme right-wing ideology, New Right think tanks such as the French GRECE believed it was necessary to borrow the tactics of the left and, more specifically, the Gramscian concept of hegemony: cultural power must precede political power. With the use of contemporary examples, Mondons article demonstrates the continuing impact these ideas have had on the Front national and French politics and society, and how this change originated in the association of populist rhetoric with the neo-racist stigmatization of the Other.

An Australian immunisation to the extreme right

Unlike many of its western counterparts, Australia has been spared powerful surges of the extreme right throughout its history. While the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw European democracies threatened time and time again by movements relying on ethno-exclusivism and thriving on capitalist crises, Australia suffered only relatively weak extreme right bursts whose impact remained marginal. Even the rise of the One Nation Party in 1996, as sudden as it was impressive, showed the limits in the Australian context for organisations which have proved long-lasting in Europe. This brief outline could bear a simple conclusion: Australia is immune to the extreme right. However, through a study of some of the most important extreme right failures in Australia, this article shows that rather than being immune, the country was spared an extreme right because of the policies put in place by mainstream parties and governments. By analysing mainstream politics in times of extreme right resurgence, this article highlights that by negating the extreme rights ability to appear as an alternative to the power in place, Australian mainstream politicians suffocated it. The conclusion of this article demonstrates that while the Australian extreme right has been mostly inaudible since 2001, extreme right politics, such as ethno-exclusivism, still play a crucial part in the shaping of Australian politics, notably during election campaigns.

Critical Research on Populism: Nine Rules of Engagement

This article formulates precise questions and ‘rules of engagement’ designed to advance our understanding of the role populism can and should play in the present political conjuncture, with potentially significant implications for critical management and organization studies and beyond. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and others working within the post-Marxist discourse-theory tradition, we defend a concept of populism understood as a form of reason that centres around a claim to represent ‘the people’, discursively constructed as an underdog in opposition to an illegitimate ‘elite’. A formal discursive approach to populism brings with it important advantages. For example, it establishes that a populist logic can be invoked to further very different political goals, from radical left to right, or from progressive to regressive. It sharpens too our grasp of important issues that are otherwise conflated and obfuscated. For instance, it helps us separate out the nativist and populist dimensions in the discourses of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Trump or the Front National (FN). Our approach to populism, however, also points to the need to engage with the rhetoric about populism, a largely ignored area of critical research. In approaching populism as a signifier, not only as a concept, we stress the added need to focus on the uses of the term ‘populism’ itself: how it is invoked, by whom and to what purpose and effect. This, we argue, requires that we pay more systematic attention to anti-populism and ‘populist hype’, and reflect upon academia’s own relation to populism and anti-populism.

Limiting Democratic Horizons to a Nationalist Reaction: Populism, the Radical Right and the Working Class

Since the 1990s, the term “populism” has become increasingly linked to reconstructed radical right parties in Europe such as the French Front National and UKIP. Through its many uses and misuses in mainstream discourse, this association has created a mythology around such parties and their appeal to the “people”. This development has facilitated the return of nationalism and racism to the forefront of the mainstream political discourse and simultaneously obscured the deeper causes for such a revival. This article explores the ways in which populist hype, based on a skewed understanding of democracy as majority, has divided the “people” along arbitrary lines, tearing communities apart at the expense of more emancipatory actions. Based predominantly on electoral analysis and discourse theory, with a particular focus on the role of abstention, the aim of this article is to examine the process through which, by way of its involuntary and constructed association with the radical right, the “people”, and the working class in particular, have become essentialised in a nationalist project, moving further away from a narrative of class struggle towards one of race struggle.