Description
The populist assault on liberal democracy and its challenge to the rules-based international order has remained a pertinent issue in international politics. Even as prominent populist leaders have recently lost important national elections, their competitive rhetoric of one country winning the world and the future, of fending off embarrassment in the present through restoring past national greatness is here to stay, as US President Joe Biden’s first Address to Congress has recently demonstrated. This paper explores the complex interplay between victory, shame, and masculinity in populist rhetoric to understand the grip of security stories that are built around the perception of shame. The paper argues that a masculine security repertoire that speaks to fantasies of triumph while claiming injury creates an emotive tension that turns abstract notions of insecurity into compelling affective narratives of biographical rupture that help to mobilize political support. To conceptually capture the broader emotive appeal of rhetoric that places ‘embarrassing’ international politics centre-stage, and to widen the International Relations disciplinary gaze, it brings together insights from critical and feminist security studies, political psychology, and communication studies.
