International Journal of Communication 
Publishes a Special Section on
Mediatized Populisms: InterAsian Lineages

 

In the aftermath of electoral victories by populist political leaders around the world, we see a new genre of scholarship on global mediatized populism, a Zeitgeist or world spirit of our times whose rise has been enabled by and through media, gaining considerable public traction. In contrast to both European and Latin American contexts which were the focus of earlier studies of media and populism, the mass-mediated spectacle of popular politics is a relatively new phenomenon across much of Asia and the Middle East. Across the InterAsian region, only since the last decade of the 20th century have government-monopolized propagandist architectures of television been replaced by commercial news channels. In the intervening years, media—both old and new—have become privileged domains of politics for the first time.

What difference does the relatively late arrival of mediatized politics across Asia make to the logic of populism?

Do media-enabled projects of people-making unfold differently in countries where states have more direct control over the media, versus those where commercial media enjoy free rein?

The essays in this Special Section disaggregate the idea of a singular media logic of populist politics and examine instead the institutional and political-economic dynamics of mediatization, and the variegated structures of media fields, in which contemporary forms of populist politics are embedded.

Relocating the study of populism does not simply fill a knowledge-gap by adding new regionally articulated examples of populisms. Instead, we approach the politics of populism from InterAsia in order to move beyond the presentist discussions on the “age of Trump.” By shifting focus away from the exceptional figure of the angry populist voter to the antecedents, afterlives, and grounds of the populist everyday, this collection of essays draws attention to the historical lineages and political-institutional contexts of mediatized politics as enabling conditions for the contemporary rise of populism.

We invite you to read these articles published in the International Journal of Communication on October 23, 2017.  Please Ctrl+Click on the article titles below for direct linking to the papers of interest.
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Mediatized Populisms: InterAsian Lineages – Introduction
Paula Chakravartty, Srirupa Roy

Digital Populism: Trolls and Political Polarization of Twitter in Turkey
Ergin Bulut, Erdem Yörük

Exuberant Politics on the Internet: Two Forms of Populism in South Korea’s 2008 Beef Protests
Jiyeon Kang

New Media, New Partisanship: Divided Virtual Politics In and Beyond Thailand
Duncan McCargo

Fragile Hegemony: Social Media and Competitive Electoral Populism in India
Subir Sinha

Broadcasting the Dharna: Mediating “Contained” Populism in Contemporary Pakistan
Ayesha Mulla

Innuendo as Outreach: @narendramodi and the Use of Political Irony on Twitter
Joyojeet Pal, Priyank Chandra, Padma Chirumamilla, Vaishnav Kameswaran, Andre Gonawela, Pritika Dasgupta

Conspiratorial Webs: Media Ecology and Parallel Realities in Turkey
Rolien Hoyng, Murat Es

Disagreement Without Dissensus: The Contradictions of Hizbollah’s Mediated Populism
Hatim El-Hibri

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Larry Gross
Editor 

Arlene Luck 
Managing Editor

Paula Chakravartty & Srirupa Roy
Guest Editors