Populism in International and Regional Organizations: Reshaping international cooperation
Populist movements, parties and leaders often portray themselves as anti-globalist and therefore often appear as challenging and undermining the value of international organizations and subverting the notion of multilateral cooperation in world politics. However, the actual track record of populists in power is more ambivalent. While many populist-led governments criticize and partly disengage from certain international organizations, they rarely withdraw completely from multilateral institutions but rather seek to change them from within or question their multilateral commitments. In some cases, populist-led governments have even initiated new transboundary cooperation initiatives, especially on the regional level.
This work package brings together research aimed at unpacking how populist actors shape countries’ strategies and policies with regard to regional and international organizations and multilateral institutions, and what the effects of these strategies and policies are for the so-called liberal international order. It has close synergies with WP1 (when it comes to the broader conceptions of the international that guide populist relations with international institutions), WP3 WP3 (especially when it comes to the diplomatic practice that populists deploy in multilateral organizations) as well as with WP4 (when it comes to exploring how contestation of multilateral institutions is used for domestic mobilization purposes)