Description
Populism has received significant attention in current political and social science debates. Accompanying this attention, a controversial debate on the relevance of populism to IR has emerged (e.g. Taggart 2000; Mudde 2004; Laclau 2005). However, there exist a lack of IR studies which systematically examine populism at the inter- and transnational level. Ernesto Laclau’s work “On Populist Reason” provides a possible conceptualization of populism suitable for such an analysis on a global level. Laclau understands populism as discursive strategy of constructing a political frontier to enable the mobilization of the ‘underdog’ against ‘those in power’ (Laclau 2005). In the proposed paper, Laclau’s perspective on populism is adopted to develop a narrative of the “Fridays for Future” movement. By doing so, this paper shows how Laclau’s concept of populism may be used to make sense of populist movements at a global level and thus evaluates its relevance to IR.
