Populism in Context

Populism in Context is a research project of critical value and urgency given the rise of populist politics and populism's activation of tensions surrounding borders and the meaning of sovereignty, contested memories, and migration. Structured around these themes, this project will bring comparative insights on the resonance of populism in local and peripheral communities in Japan, the United Kingdom, and Russia.

The aim of this project is to bring together a dynamic and diverse group of scholars from Japan and the United Kingdom with an emphasis on combining different disciplines and area studies specialisations to further develop our understandings of populism. It will give early career researchers working in geography, political science, history, area-studies, and sociology a unique opportunity to raise their international research profiles and to connect with communities and stakeholders beyond the confines of their disciplinary and geographical areas of study. The network is designed to provide opportunities for the fruitful cross-fertilisation of theoretical approaches and the sharing of empirical resources and knowledge beyond participant's areas of expertise.

Collaboration will take place in the form of two workshops, one in Japan and one in the United Kingdom. These will be accompanied by literature reviews on how populism intersects with the sub-themes of borders/sovereignty, memory, and migration in three case-studies (UK, Japan and Russia). The participants will engage with non-profit organisations and local authorities impacted by populist politics, and they will co-produce papers for a major international conference. All of these activities will inform an application for securing major international funding for a project on the divergence and convergence of populist politics in different contexts.

The first meeting of the project will be a workshop at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. It will serve as an introduction to the participants and their research, and will include presentations on how each participant's research relates to the project and its sub-themes. The event will also include a half-day session on identifying and exploring the key synergies between the academic participants and non-profit and local government stakeholders working with borderland communities.

The second meeting of participants will take place in the United Kingdom and will combine co-produced panels at the British International Studies Association annual conference with a grant-writing workshop at the University of Birmingham. The literature reviews and conference presentations will be published online and will form the beginning of a new resource on populism in different contexts. The grant-writing component will draw on the literature reviews and to ensure impact Birmingham City Council will attend the Birmingham workshop in order to gain insights into the ways in which populist tropes pose challenges to this "super-diverse" city.

Populism in Context will engage with a diverse range of stakeholders to maximise opportunities for impact. It will inform policy-making on community cohesion in the face of exclusionary, populist politics; amplify the voices of marginalised and peripheral communities as a counter to populist-nationalist narratives; inform policy-making with a focus on the local level; and aim to reach the widest possible audience.

The project's collaboration with NPOs and local authorities will be a two-way process with benefits for both communities in terms of refining the project's objectives and producing research with broad relevance to stakeholders and society. A cumulative result of the project will be to make a contribution to policy formulation in the target countries by addressing knowledge gaps around the emergence, generation and potential of populist tropes for undermining relations within and between communities in different contexts.

The project will provide valuable citizen insights and will facilitate the sharing of applicable knowledge on how to respond to tropes, themes and disinformation that impact on social cohesion. Validation will involve engagement and discussion with stakeholders at the two project workshops.

The project will also be of benefit to civil society actors by engaging with specific communities that are marginalised and uniquely receptive / vulnerable to some of the identity politics and disinformation strategies employed by populist politicians. It will also bring to the attention of policy makers the perspectives of groups situated on geographical and societal margins.

One of the project's overriding ambitions is to work towards countering the politics of division associated with populism and to build more constructive relationships between communities through facilitating the work of local authorities and other NPOs. The following benefits to external stakeholders will be:

i) the provision of ideas on building community cohesion in the face of exclusionary, populist politics
ii) to amplify the voices of marginalised and peripheral communities that populist-nationalist narratives focus on
iii) to empower local decision makers with applicable knowledge.

From our initial stakeholder contributors we will also seek to reach out to a wider cohort of stakeholder partners and we will produce a database of stakeholder inputs and potential beneficiaries.

Through exploring why populist tropes resonate in one context and not in another, our involvement with stakeholders will ensure effective benefits in terms of mutual learning, partnership-building and relevance. Given that populist movements work to deny the value of institutions, "elites" and experts, there is an urgency to involve stakeholders and to ensure their input so that we can develop effective counter-measures to the divisive and dangerous elements of populism.