Séminaire dans le cadre de l'initiative de recherche "Mouvements sociaux à l'âge global" dirigée par Geoffrey Pleyers

Paolo Gerbaudo (King’s College London) will present his book The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest (march 2017)

Populism is a term that has for long been associated with the extreme Right, and which is now often used in connection with xenophobic demagogues as Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen. Yet, in the wake of the Great Recession populism is not  limited to the political Right. In recent years in Europe and the US we have seen a number of left-wing phenomena that use a populist rhetoric to rallyordinary people against the super-rich and the super-powerful who have been responsible for the 2008 economic crisis.

Paolo Gerbaudo's new book 'The Mask and the Flag' discusses the origins of this 21st century left-wing populism in the movement of the squares of 2011 from the Arab Spring, to Spanish Indignados and Occupy Wall Street and its evolution in new political formations and candidates, as Podemos in Spain and Bernie Sanders in the US. It argues that the occupation of public squares all over the world, have marked the beginning of a new political cycle which holds the promise of radical change beyond the chaos of neoliberal capitalism and constitutes the best antidote against the threat of rightwing populism.