Far Right and Islamist Populism

Far Right and Islamist Populism: How They Disrupt the Hegemonic Order undertakes the challenging task of bringing dialectical logic together with the empirical study of discursive and ideological antagonisms. Examining the European far right, as represented by Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and Hizb ut-Tahrir as the Islamic interlocutor, the book demonstrates the inner logic by which two opposing political ideologies create a single populist front. In their shared practice of opposing and disrupting the hegemonic order, they draw on each other to encapsulate the contradictory desires and discontents of people in a mutually constituted Muslim Other. These cleavages and dissonances are reconciled in a bipolar identification of the ‘people’ versus the ‘ummah’ to establish a new hegemonic formation.

The book demonstrates the reality and seriousness of this symbiotic relationship for pluralist democracies and harmonious coexistence. It explores how different, alternative formulations of populism drawing on the works of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Žižek, among others, can function as a counter-movement to the influence of far right and Islamist populist politics.

Dr. Susan de Groot Heupner is a political sociologist with a research focus on populist mobilisations and hegemonic ideological constructions. She is a Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University in Melbourne, where she researches religious populism, affective polarisation, and authoritarian political mobilisation. She has published in journals such as Politics and Religion, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Religions, and Journal of International Communication, and has contributed to public media platforms like The Conversation, ABC, and Enlighten.