ABSTRACT

The rise of exclusionary populism is widely regarded as one of the most significant phenomena in today’s political world.  While some element of endangerment or threat to security is central to the populist claim to defend ‘the people’, the issue remains under-explored in the literature, including the affective power of populist security narratives. Against this background, this paper seeks to address this gap in our understanding through a comparative analysis of radical right populist (RRP) discourse in response to two recent shocking crimes committed by migrants in France and Ireland. The analysis demonstrates, in line with the previous literature, that the two RRPs carry a distinctive ‘low’ emotional aesthetic centred on ‘sentimental ordinariness’ but argues that these differ according to the ‘logic of appropriateness’ developed by the respective political parties and the ‘security culture’ of the two countries. Ultimately, the paper argues for greater attention to the affective appeal of security issues for parties on the right, but also to the role of institutions in managing emotional practices—or ‘emotional templating’. 

SPEAKER DETAILS

Professor Claire Hamilton is Professor of Criminology and Head of Criminology in the School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University, Ireland. Her research interests coalesce around the (comparative) politics of crime and security, spanning criminal procedure reforms, counter-terrorism and penology. Professor Hamilton has published widely in various national and international legal and criminological journals and she is the author/co-editor of six books, the most recent of which is the Research Handbook of Comparative Criminal Justice (Edward Elgar, 2022, co-edited with David Nelken). As a current academic visitor to the Institute of Criminology at Griffith University, Brisbane, she is developing her work on ‘security populism’, which aims to investigate the emotional politics of populist discourse on security and rights. 

ADDITIONAL DETAILS

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