Populism, conflict and war

This article aims to contribute to a growing domain of research linking domestic and international aspects of populism. Stressing leadership performance and communicative style as key to defining populism, it discusses several aspects that turn populist leaderships into riskier for the international global order, among them populism’s antagonistic character, emotional tonality and personalistic concentration of decision-making. The article analyzes the international impact of full-blown populist leaders, that is those populists who, once in power, have altered the constitutional and unwritten rules of the game and have dominated foreign policy in a personalistic way. It looks at the constellation of factors that allowed or precluded leaders such as Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu, India’s PM Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump in his second presidency to engage in international confrontations and wars. The text claims that, unless there are mitigating institutional, sociocultural or geopolitical factors, full-blown populists in power may turn confrontational not just at the nation-state level but also in their foreign policy praxis. Analysis leads to identifying in a preliminary way factors increasing the likelihood of conflictive international outcomes.