Articulating Populism in Place: the case of Kirchnerism in Argentina

SAM HALVORSEN; FERNANDA TORRES

Online Conference

Conferencia; Populism in Latin America and Beyond.; 2021

King's College London

How are places, and their particular political identities and antagonisms, articulated with a national popular movement? Populist scholarship has placed overwhelming emphasis on how different subjects are articulated within a national project, with debates centred on the significance of categories such as class and race. Much less has been written about how populist movements seek to articulate across geographical differences and the significance of this for their relative successes. This paper builds on geographical scholarship in order to argue that place - understood as the geographical context of political subjectivities and antagonisms - provides a crucial context for structuring populist articulation. By focusing on key populist actors - political parties and social movements - across two contrasting regions of Argentina, we examine how the national popular Kichnerist movement’s articulation of political subjectivities and demands were informed by placebased context. We build on recent geographical readings of populism, in particular Gillian Hart’s Gramscian reading of articulation and translation. In so doing, the paper provides a place-based reading of populism that holds Argentina as its theoretical and empirical starting point. At the heart of our argument is the assertion that populism cannot be understood in abstract terms, rather it must be appreciated through the particular, place-based contexts that allow it to be articulated and provide certain contradictions that will need to be confronted.