Description
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has promoted the discourse of a brave, freedom-loving people confronting a malevolent, authoritarian adversary. What makes this security discourse distinct is the aesthetic manner in which Zelenskyy has performed it – impassioned, sentimental, blunt and informal, coupled with strategic use of humour. Focusing on Zelenskyy as an incarnation of a populist type of leadership, this paper aims to examine the relationship between populism, security and aesthetics. I argue that populists tend to embrace a performative representation of (in)security intended to resonate with the experiences of those who find themselves at the margins of global security politics (whether in a real or imagined sense). I show that by embodying the Ukrainian people as an empowered political subject capable of agency, Zelenskyy seeks to challenge its assigned role as a passive victim or a bargaining chip in great power politics. This research contributes to the IR scholarship on the aesthetic, performative, and affective dimensions of populist security imaginaries, shedding light on how populist actors may prompt a recasting of the aesthetic regime of global politics with its concomitant hierarchies and inequalities.
