A/73/305 nationalist populism; (b) to map the most pressing of the dangers it poses from a racial equality perspective; and (c) to recall the international human rights equality and nondiscrimination standards that apply in this context. 7. There are different perspectives among political scientists regarding how best to conceptualize and define populism. Four leading approaches to defining populism are to treat it as an ideology, a form of discourse or rhetoric, a political strategy or a type of political logic. 2 The present report implicitly considers populism in all four modes. 8. Although the meaning of populism remains contested, there are a number of defining features that enjoy relative consensus in academic literature and capture the specific political phenomena at stake in the present analysis. Generally speaking, the ideology of populism focuses on societal cleavage between unaccountable or corrupt elites and “the people”, a general populace viewed as exploited or neglected by those power-holding elites. In its most dangerous variants, populism deploys a monolithic, exclusionary vision of who qualifies as “the people.” Those groups and individuals depicted as excluded from forming a part of “the people” then also become targets of populist antagonism, even if those groups and individuals have no elite status. 3 This has led one scholar to argue that populism is “an exclusionary form of identity politics”. 4 Critical to a human rights understanding of dangerous populist mobilizations, then, is that they tend to be not just anti -elitist, but anti-pluralist, as discussed in more detail below. 9. There is a fair amount of consensus among populism scholars that populism is ideologically “thin-centred”, and that its limited ideological content typically means that populism must be combined with some other ideology before it can be an effective political force. 5 As a result, populist movements and political parties occupy the broad spectrum of political positions, such that populist movements have existed in centre, left-wing and right-wing manifestations. Across Europe and in the United States of America, for example, contemporary populist fervour has largely reflected right-wing commitments, whereas in Asia and Latin America, centre and left -wing populist movements have had more pronounced successes. 10. Although populism on the right and the left commonly adopts anti-establishment positions, often calling for the dismantling of various liberal democratic institutions viewed as disadvantageous to the group identified as “the people”, political scientists have found that right-wing populism tends to be inward-looking and primarily nationalist in its orientation, whereas left-wing populism has traditionally been oriented towards internationalism. 6 One reason for this is that “left-wing populist parties define the people on a class basis, referring mostly to the poor. In contrast, right-wing populist parties define the people on a cultural, nativist base ”. 7 Research has also found that, unlike left-wing populism, right-wing populism is notably hostile to minority rights. 8 This is not to say that left-wing populism cannot threaten human __________________ 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 18-12945 Ibid., chap. 2. Hanspeter Kriesi and Takis S. Pappas, “Populism in Europe during crisis: an introduction”, in Kriesi and Pappas, eds., European Populism in the Shadow of the Great Recession (Colchester, United Kingdom, ECPR Press, 2015), p. 5. Jan-Werner Müller, What is Populism? (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 3. Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (New York, Oxford University Press, 2017). Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (London, Sage, 2015), p. 148. Robert A. Huber and Christian H. Schimpf, “On the distinct effects of left-wing and right-wing populism on democratic quality”, Politics and Governance, vol. 5, No. 4 (2017), p. 148. Ibid., p. 151. 5/22