Speaker: Prof Claire Hamilton, Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology

Title: 'The New Moving Right Show': Criminologists on Radical Right Populism

The rise of exclusionary populism is widely regarded as one of the most significant phenomena in today’s political world. The populist ‘explosion’ (Judis, 2016), has come to dominate both news headlines and scholarly agendas in recent years, evident not only in the twin shocks of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, but by a rash of electoral successes for far-right populist parties in Europe. Against the background of this 'New Moving Right Show' (Knott, 2020), the aim of this seminar is to examine radical right or ‘exclusionary populism’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017) through the relatively overlooked lens of security. As a number of scholars have noted, 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 (Hamilton, 2022; Béland, 2021; Levi and Agmon, 2021; Kurylo, 2022). Beyond deradicalisation and Countering Violent Extremism strategies (Perry and Scriven, 2021), therefore, criminology has much to offer discussion on contemporary radical right populism, not least the 'lessons' from our long experience with 'penal populism' (Chamberlen and Carvalho, 2019).