Day two of the third ACRPS Winter School, “Variations in Populism”, opened with a lecture from Abdelwahab El-Affendi. Professor of Political Science and President of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. The lecture, titled “The War against Windmills: Populism and Conspiracy Narratives”, dissected common narratives of modern populist discourse, and analyzed how conspiracy narratives of insecurity have been vital to the rise and expansion of some of the major populist movements in the West. El-Affendi also looked briefly at similar populist trends in the Arab World, and the way they deploy similar narratives of “grand conspiracy” to give meaning to their otherwise pathologically self-destructive conduct. He concluded that, contrary to the opinion of theorists who maintain that populist movements are “rational” and even equate them with politics, populism is inherently anti-rational, if not outright irrational.
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