GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE AUTHORITARIAN CONJUNCTURE

The ascent of right-wing politics across the globe has become a common observation. From terms such as ‘far-right extremism’ or ‘right-wing populism’ in the 2000s and 2010s,  the names for this development have moved towards the vocabulary of ‚fascism‘ –  indicating a growing concern with the barefaced violence that dominates the current political moment. The escalation of an international drift to the right has been  accompanied by a row of global and planetary ruptures, from financial crashes to the  pandemic, from inflation to war. The current conjuncture of authoritarianism seems to respond to a period of converging, mutating and metastasizing crises. The ‘global’ quality  of this conjuncture calls for the development of ‘global’ perspectives. Such perspectives  could emphasize – at least – three important insights from critical research:  

Authoritarian politics are international. They are both obsessed with and exceed the  boundaries of nation states. They can harbor geopolitical and imperial projects, and they can enlist transnational or diasporic communities into their projects. This calls not only for contextual analyses of ‘varieties of authoritarianism’, but also for a consideration of the mobility of far-right ideologies, actors or infrastructures as they traverse multiple spaces and connect new constituencies.  

Authoritarian politics are not a phenomenon of the fringes. Their growing acceptability  suggests that authoritarian takes are latent elements in the fabric of ‘liberal-democratic  societies’ and neoliberal rationality. This provokes us to develop an understanding that views them not only as ‘far’-right but at points very ‘near’ to dominant discourses and  affects, and to trace under which conditions latent potentials for authoritarian violence  become actualized.  

Authoritarian politics entrench themselves on different scales of political life. This can  range from the strategies of political parties to reshape the parliamentary terrain, to the  tweaking of algorithmic publics by ‘Big Tech’, to the efforts to shift common sense and  everyday life through interventions in culture and media. Multi-scalar analyses and an  interdisciplinary debate are necessary to explore and diagnose where and how  authoritarian entrenchment succeeds – and where it fails. 

On July 15th, the »Migration in Global Perspective« Department at the Berlin Institute of  Empirical Migration Research (BIM) and the International Research Group on  Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC) bring together interdisciplinary scholars  to present recent and ongoing research on the cultural, economic and technological  dimensions of right-wing politics as they confront us in the contemporary moment.  Through shared discussions, exchanges and collaboration we hope to further develop  global perspectives on the current authoritarian conjuncture.  

As the number of participants is limited, we kindly ask you to register by sending an email  to sowmya.maheswaran@hu-berlin.de by 31 May 2026.  

PRELIMINARY AGENDA  

Wednesday, 15th July 10 am — 5 pm  

09:30 – 10:00: Arrival, Coffee  

10:00 – 10:30: Introduction  

10:30 – 12:00: Panel I: Authoritarian Violence In and Beyond the State  

Authoritarian Appeal and Counterstrategies in Mexico and El  Salvador in Times of Militarized Nationalism and Global Reactionary  Populism; Pablo Uc

Illegal Border Controls, Illegal Rejections, Unlawful Detentions? –  Ethnographic Insights from the German Land Border; Hannah Sommer  

Authoritarian Civil Society?; Claudia Cuellar

12:00 – 13:30: Coffee and Lunch  

13:30 – 15:00: Panel II: Conditions for Anti-Authoritarian Contestations Authoritarian Epistemic Politics and the Right to Revolt; Asel Doolotkeldieva  

Suspicious Solidarity: Palestine and the Limits of Liberal Anti Authoritarianism; Yasemeen Daher  

Road to Fascistization: Understanding the Coming Post-Interregnum  from the Perspective of Theory of Alienation; Ali Yalçın Göymen  

15:00 – 15:15: Coffee Break  

15:15 – 16:45: Panel III: Authoritarian Appeals 

Post-Socialist “Weltverlust” and the Racist Conjuncture in Berlin;  Marthe Völker  

The Role of Religious Minorities in Reactionary Historical Blocs:  Punitive Secularism, the Politics of Surplus Life-Time, and Orthodox  Realignment ; Julian Aaron Ross  

Intergenerational Glitch: Ethnographic Insights into Adolescents’ Appeal to Right-Wing Politics;  Paülah Nurit Shabel  

16:45 – 17:00: Outro  

From 18:30 onwards the Institute for European Ethnology’s Sommerfest takes place in the  Backyard, to which attendees are warmly invited.  

Workshop Organizer:  Alexander Harder (BIM/IfEE), Börries Nehe (IRGAC), Sowmya Maheswaran