Global Illiberalism: Comparative Approaches and Transnational Connections

Global Illiberalism: Comparative Approaches and Transnational Connections

Marlène Laruelle and Christophe Jaffrelot

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The articles collected here move from the theoretical to the empirical, from broad questions about what illiberalism is and why citizens embrace it, to concrete case studies of how illiberal leaders consolidate power, how far-right ideas cross borders and enter the mainstream, and how illiberal regimes reshape the physical landscape of memory.

The issue opens with two theoretical frameworks that together address illiberalism at different scales. Marlène Laruelle, Maxime Audinet, and Maxime Daniélou offer a conceptual architecture for understanding what they call Russia’s “illiberal anticolonialism:” a hybrid strategic narrative through which Russian foreign policy discourse selectively reappropriates Soviet internationalist legacies while drawing on conservative, sovereigntist, and civilizational repertoires. The article identifies four mutually reinforcing registers—majoritarianism, sovereigntism, civilizationism, and conservatism—that together constitute the ideological grammar of the Putin regime and supply the conceptual bridge through which illiberalism opens onto an anticolonial narrative for Global South audiences.

Steve Livingston’s contribution operates at the opposite end of the scale, turning from the architecture of a global ideological system to the question of why ordinary citizens embrace factually unsound beliefs. Taking as his entry point the public uptake of Donald Trump’s claim during the September 2024 presidential debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets, Livingston argues that the dominant “standard model” in political science, grounded in cognitive science and the concept of motivated reasoning, fails to adequately explain such phenomena. Indeed, it rests on a methodological individualism that looks inward at mental states rather than outward at social and economic conditions. Drawing on Ziblatt’s conservative dilemma model and a rich tradition of sociological holism from Durkheim to Berger and Luckmann, Livingston contends that conspiratorial beliefs have as much to do with a deep human need for meaning, purpose, and community, generated by decades of neoliberal dismantling of social structures, as they do with cognitive bias.

Together, these two opening articles frame the issue’s central inquiry: illiberalism is simultaneously a structured ideological project deployed from above and a response to genuine social disorientation experienced from below.

The issue then turns to comparative case studies of illiberalism in power. Marc Lazar’s essay on Giorgia Meloni and her Fratelli d’Italia party offers a methodically careful anatomy of what Italian democracy has and has not become since 2022. Beginning with a rigorous conceptual untangling of populism, fascism, and illiberalism as distinct but overlapping categories, Lazar argues that Meloni has not, for the moment, transformed Italy into a full illiberal democracy, but that she displays a consistent tendency toward illiberalism in her institutional reforms, her treatment of the judiciary and the media, her cultural politics, and her management of migration. Equally significant is Lazar’s analysis of the triangular relationship between Meloni, Trump, and the European Union: ideological affinities coexist with real policy divergences, particularly over Ukraine and trade, forcing Meloni into “constant contortions” between her transatlantic ideological project and Italy’s concrete national interests. The Italian case thus illuminates, in fine-grained detail, how illiberalism operates within the constraints and resilience of an established Western democracy.

The two articles that follow trace the mechanisms by which far-right ideas travel across borders and generations. Cécile Leconte asks how Renaud Camus’s “Great Replacement” became one of the central references of Trumpist Republicans during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign. Drawing on socio-historical work and research on the circulation of ideas, Leconte identifies two explanatory mechanisms. First, brokers positioned at the interface between the white supremacist fringe and mainstream conservatism such as Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson systematically euphemized the formula, enabling it to migrate from the alt-right into the Republican mainstream. Second, in the aftermath of the contested 2020 election, MAGA Republicans fused the Great Replacement with the Big Lie to produce a specific American variant, “Voter Replacement,” which activates long-standing representations of U.S. citizenship as white citizenship and frames non-white electoral participation as inherently illegitimate.

Pauline Picco’s study of Jean-Yves Le Gallou, a secondary figure of the French far right whose five-decade career spans the ethnonationalist think tank GRECE, the Club de l’Horloge, and the Front National, complements Leconte’s analysis by zooming in on the individual broker as a unit of analysis. Picco shows how Le Gallou translated the metapolitical constructs of the Nouvelle Droite, including the concept of “preference nationale” and, later, the Great Replacement itself, into party programs, institutional strategies, and media interventions, progressively eroding the cordon sanitaire between far-right actors and the mainstream. Read together, the Leconte and Picco articles illuminate two complementary dimensions of the same phenomenon: the transatlantic trajectory of an idea, and the figure of the ideological entrepreneur who makes such trajectories possible.

The conference papers close with Christophe Jaffrelot’s analysis of the international dimension of the Hindu national-populist repertoire of victimhood under Narendra Modi. Widening the issue’s comparative lens to the Global South, Jaffrelot traces how Modi has systematically deployed a “politics of fear,” constructing the Hindu majority as a vulnerable community besieged by Pakistani terrorism, Bangladeshi infiltration, and, most recently, “Hinduphobia” in North America. This repertoire of existential threat serves a dual purpose: projecting Modi as the indispensable protector of his community while discrediting political opponents as insufficiently national. Jaffrelot’s contribution underscores a point implicit throughout the issue: that illiberal leaders, whether in Europe, Russia, or India, share a common toolkit of manufactured threat of demographic submersion, instrumentalization of border anxieties, and casting of electoral politics as majority survival.

The issue concludes with two articles that were not part of the final conference of the cycle mentioned above, but that enrich its thematic scope in important ways. Josh Vandiver examines the geopolitical visions of the masculinist right through the lens of strategic culture, focusing on the online men’s magazine Man’s World as a vehicle for a distinctive metanarrative that fuses a cult of bodybuilding and colonial frontier geopolitics with anti-Western, pro-Putin advocacy. Deploying the framework of strategic culture developed in Cold War defense think tanks and later applied to non-state actors, Vandiver argues that the “BAPian masculinists” associated with the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert constitute a strategic community with a coherent metanarrative, a masculine habitus, and a friend-enemy distinction that shapes their reading of contemporary conflicts, including the war in Ukraine.

Finally, Graziela Ares brings the issue to a close with a granular case study of memory politics in Budapest’s Kossuth Square, showing how Hungary’s Parliament Resolution of 2011 and the subsequent Imre Steindl renovation program have used ostensibly democratic instruments to confiscate the agency over the past and erase from Hungary’s main constitutional square all material traces of the period between 1944 and 1990. Where Vandiver’s article shows illiberalism working through subculture and geopolitical imagination, Ares shows it working through stone and bronze, reordering the urban landscape to render inconvenient historical experiences literally invisible.

Taken as a whole, the articles in this issue resist any single definition of illiberalism as a finished or stable object. What emerges instead is a picture of a dynamic, polymorphic, and transnational phenomenon that operates simultaneously as a state-level ideological project, a repertoire of political entrepreneurship, a set of traveling ideas, and a lived social response to the dislocations of liberal modernity.