Sovereignism is at the crux of the current wave of radical right-wing populism (RRP). While sovereignism may concern different dimensions, claims by RRP parties and leaders about regaining sovereignty are increasingly associated with socioeconomic issues such as welfare, redistribution and international trade. Adopting a demand-side perspective, this article draws from an original cross-national survey to investigate the intersection between economic sovereignism, economic populism and globalization attitudes, and how such attitudes may shape RRP voting in Western Europe and the United States. Our results confirm that economic populism and sovereignism form coherent sets of attitudes together with perceptions of globalization, and that such attitudes have a significant effect on support for RRP actors. We find different patterns of association, however, across our European cases and the United States, which suggests that the relationship between populism, sovereignism and economic globalization is partly dependent upon national context and historical legacies.

Scholarly treatments of the human rights agenda tend to posit civil society organisations (CSOs) as its defender and the state and mainstream political actors as its violators. Even when raising the problem of an ‘uncivil society’, the literature labels these CSOs as reactive and hostile to the human rights agenda they perceive as ‘Western’ and ‘foreign’. I argue that these treatments of the issue overlook another phenomenon: the emergence of CSOs that adopted the language of human rights and participated in its formal processes yet subtly redefined, subverted, and undermined the core commitments of the human rights agenda. This paper discusses such developments by referencing right-wing non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Malaysia that redefined the parameters of the human rights agenda to undercut state commitments to protect religious freedom, sexuality rights, and gender minorities. Through actor and discourse tracing, this paper illustrates how right-wing Islamist NGOs employed a novel two-pronged strategy that no longer openly repudiated the human rights agenda but continued to erode, eviscerate, and reformulate its contents and principles. The first prong involved institutional measures of ‘getting in’ to gain legitimacy by participating as a stakeholder within local and international human rights processes. The second prong encompassed social strategies of ‘pushing out’, whereby actors and their networks mobilised populist pressure to expose, ostracise, and subvert established human rights norms, institutions, and actors.

This article studies the unfolding of a broad conservative bloc amidst the politico-cultural battles that took place in Cold War Argentina. Focusing on the unexplored gendered, sexual and generational dimensions of the figure of the ‘enemy within’, the article shows that this figure was at the core of a project which coincided with authoritarian practices emanating from the state and also from segments of civil society. The creation of that figure had significant effects, not only in the political but also in the educational and cultural realms, including the imposition of censorship and the delineation of restrictive sexual policies. Moreover, it conditioned the ways in which political repression developed in the context of 1970s state terrorism.