As the climate crisis becomes more and more dire, the far right has tried–with varying degrees of success—to foster and capitalize on climate change-related frictions (when it hasn’t fabricated those tensions). Their climate narratives and policy proposals, as trivotal to their core ideology, are fluid and often inconsistent, and this flexibility affords them the possibility of deepening divides that can be utilized to the far right’s advantage.

Increasingly inhumane migration policy — and the accompanying narratives that justify those policies — can open the door to policies in other arenas that would have previously been decried as illiberal and anti-democratic. They normalize practices such as administrative detention and desensitize us to dehumanization. Once the far right comes to power, others have prepared the public and built the necessary legal or technological infrastructure. These migration policies can become the precursor of what’s to come for all, a harbinger of what can befall anyone deemed inconvenient, whether a citizen or not.

Facing the fierce winds of climate chaos, of growing geopolitical instabilities around the world, of declining trust in democratic institutions, and of pandemic futures replete with bacterial agents and viral thresholds, it is becoming increasingly urgent to revisit conversations about belonging and democracy from less familiar vantage points, and to interrogate the citizen-subject beyond the confines of the humanist liberal world order that usually frames it.

And as the year comes to an end and I try to reflect on the months passed, I sometimes wonder if, as I am constantly steeped in research on authoritarian populism, my perspective is too clouded by the negatives. Yet no matter where I look, whether it’s in international news, progressive spaces, or far-right forums, the pervasive sensation I observe is usually a combination of anxiety, fear, and anger. But again, is this new or worse? When has the world been fair? When have we inhabited a planet where all belong?

Authoritarian populists, on the contrary, appropriate the language of democracy activists and legal scholars, particularly arguments that relate to democracy and the rule of law, to delegitimize others who oppose them and prop themselves as the defenders of democracy, playing the game of courting large swathes of the public who would never have contemplated voting for extremists and are largely pro-democracy. They need to do so because authoritarian populists hold elections, and so, they are more dependent on the manipulation of information and the need to brand themselves as democrats.

“The world is at war. In the grip of lines and stencilled territories, we enact logics that exceed us, that transgress the categoricity of morally independent actors, and that might offer us a strange bewildering other thing, a line of flight away from this toxic convergence of lines. In such a world, no move is too small: every gesture ripples out into a vast tumble and tangle of things, potentizing this forest with new intelligences, with the soft response that might invite us to consider that solutions may get in the way of transformation, and that the thing to do is dance with the trouble.”

Join us on October 26-27, 2023 in Berlin for a dynamic gathering of changemakers, scholars, and artists committed to building inclusive and democratic futures in Europe, the US, and around the world. Share and learn new ideas and practices to strengthen democracy and belonging —with the urgency this moment requires, and the joy and hope our movements need.

If migration is the key topic of modern authoritarian populists, the Spanish far right party has not been an exception in promoting anti-immigrant sentiment. Rhetorically, they have unrelentingly framed unaccompanied minor migrants as criminals in insistent and odious campaigns. Now, for many not on the far right, including some young progressives, this acronym immediately brings up fears rather than compassion or solidarity. This is the frame that dominates, whether the far right is in the room or not. Far-right ideas have become detached from far-right actors.”

“Europe doesn’t talk much about race. Although some have a lot to say about racism in Europe and there are well-established anti-racist organizations across the continent, others easily conclude the conversation with something along the lines of “this is not an issue in this continent,” “it’s not about race, it’s about modern migration,” or, often, “but we are not the US.”

Tomorrow, more than 40 civic and philanthropic leaders from across Europe and OBI Director john a. powell are gathering in Portugal for a retreat hosted by the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt and OBI’s Democracy & Belonging Forum on the topic of racialization and othering in Europe.

“We are committed to unlocking the possibilities that exist beyond the story that difficult conversations of conflict, difference, or injustice must be avoided out of fear, won out of righteousness, or bulldozed with aggression. We want to co-create a countercultural movement of people relating to difference, reframing conflict, and practicing bridging and belonging in ways that both ground in and build toward our vision of justice and liberation.”

“… in matters of gender there are actually many differences within and between far right parties and movements in different parts of the world. The far right often adopts liberal frames when convenient, but across the board we observe a more mixed bag of narratives and policy proposals. “

In recent years, political scientists, psychologists, and commentators have grown increasingly interested in the psychological theories that explain political and social attitudes. Threat perception, the Authoritarian Dynamic, Moral Foundations Theory, and Social Dominance Theory are models that are likely to evolve and improve, but they serve as useful frameworks to understand the current moment and build empathy for those who have a different worldview - wherever you stand.

How can social justice movements address the threats posed by democratic degradation and populist authoritarianism while advancing their longer-term goals? How can they reorient their work towards an ethos of defragmentation, bridging, and democratic renewal? It is to these questions that we turn.

“Words can lure groups and communities into dangerous and destructive ideologies, turning them into ardent supporters of disastrous deeds and policies. However, language can also serve as a bridge that unites people and fosters healing on a collective level.”

It is my belief that in no other domain – and I will admit that having worked in this space I may be slightly biased – do we see the power of narrative oceans more strongly than in migration. Unfortunately, the loudest stories that dominate the migration narrative ocean share a thread of othering and dehumanization.

“‘I’ wrote this essay with an eye of Black geographies, haunted outdoors, the hidden public that subsidizes the obvious. From within that space, there is - in my opinion - a groundswell of impulses and movements gesturing towards the more-than-just. Gesturing towards 'breaks' of some kind. This essay is an attempt to trace those wandering yearnings for another sun.”

We're thrilled to share an extraordinary new work from our Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe. In many ways, Bayo's piece defies any simple description or summary, but at its most basic, this two-part essay seeks to explore the limits of the Black Lives Matter frame in advancing justice and the possibility for reimagining identities altogether.

If you fashion your emancipation using the materials of your oppression, using the same epistemological frameworks of your incarceration, you risk reinforcing your oppression.

It may be reassuring to the justice-seeking efforts of BLM to imagine that the thrust of politics is to overwhelm the racists, to educate them out of their hatred, to address systematic oppression so that Black individuals might thrive, but the individual, the traditionalist human subject, is already a form of genocide. This genocide is not some distant event in the past, but an ongoing reproduction of the ‘world’ as ‘clearing’ – a cutting off the ways we are imbricated with ecological matterings that coincides with the killing fields of industrial gentrification and with the asylum captivity that is named, ‘the Human’. […]

Four days away from the Christmas of 1848, in the dark and occult hours before morning wakes, Ellen and William Craft beheld each other through tearful eyes for the last time. Minutes later, they collapsed to the floor, both falling into a writhing heap of limbs and agony, convulsing, trembling, and flailing until the strong brew they had ingested hours earlier passed through them. When the sun yawned awake to the sounds of the cock crow, his surveillant gaze travelled across the undulating fields of Georgia, across the cottonfields of one plantation in Macon, and fell through the cracks of the cabin where two lovers had spent their last human moments, and where a few obsidian-black feathers belonging to two fugitive crows now littered the log floor – tell-tale signs of a daring escape, a transformation too offensive for history to embrace.    

But they were not the first to turn, you see. […]