Ascendant Nationalist Populist Ideologies and Strategies: A sobering threat to racial equality

Date of Meeting: October 31, 2018

Meeting Organizer: Mandate of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and related intolerance

ISJC Staff Present: Major Victoria Edmonds

Reporter: Major Victoria Edmonds

Which SDG does this topic cover? SDG 1, 4,5,8,16

Type of meeting: Information Sharing

The UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and related Intolerance, Tendayl Achiume called this meeting so that she could present her findings to the global community on this topic.

The purpose of the meeting was to raise awareness about the dangers that nationalist populism represent for racial equality, and the urgency to denounce the racist and xenophobic lies of populist nationalist and to adopt all the necessary measures to comeback racist populist expressions and counter the rising climate of intolerance.  The event also gave opportunity to share practices and to strengthen a multi-stakeholder dialogue to promote respect for human rights, non-discrimination and racial equality.

The panel consisted of:

Moderator – Tendayi Achiume – UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and related Intolerance

H.E. Marc Pecsteen de Buytswerve – Permanent Representative of the Belgium

Craig Mokhiber – Director, Office of the Human RightsR

Jamil Dakwar – Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program

Michael Balcerzak, - Chairperson, Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent

Gay McDougall – UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

Some of the points brought up in this meeting regarding racial discrimination

• Accepting partial information as the whole truth
• Education is the key for people knowing what is right and what is wrong
• Failure to confront wrong doing
• Freedom of speech
• Global rise on hate speech
• Holding people accountable
• Inadequate education
• Mobilization
• Rejecting violence
• Speaking out
• Shrinking of liberal democratic and civic space
• Telling the truth
• Violence on killing
• Willing to take sides and not just be neutral on a subject

The Special Rapporteur talked about her report to the Third Committee of the General Assembly regarding the threat posed by nationalist populism to the fundamental human rights principles of nondiscrimination and equality.  Her report pointed out that nationalist’s populist ideologies and strategies that pose a sobering threat to racial equality by fueling discrimination, intolerance and the creation of institutions and structures that will have enduring legacies of racial exclusion.

Her report condemns nationalist populism that advances exclusionary or repressive practices and policies that harm individuals or groups on the basis of their race, ethnicity, national origin and religion, including in combination with gender sexual orientation, disability status, migratory status or other related social categories.  The objectives of the report was to contribute a measure of analytical clarity to human rights debates regarding nationalist populism, to map the most pressing of the dangers it poses from a racial equality perspective, and to recall the international human rights equality and non-discrimination standards that apply.

The key points the Special Rapporteur highlighted in her report are:

1. The threat of nationalist populism to racial equality 

• The Special Rapporteur condemns nationalist populism that advances exclusionary or repressive practices and policies that harm individuals or groups on the basis of their race, ethnicity, national origin and religion, in combination with gender, sexual orientation, disability status, migratory status or other related social categories.
• Populism on the right and the left commonly adopts anti-establishment positions, often calling for the dismantling of various liberal democratic institutions viewed as disadvantageous to the group identified as “the people”, political scientists have found that right-wing populism tends to be inward-looking and primarily nationalist in its orientation, whereas left-wing populism has traditionally been oriented towards internationalism.

• The report centres on nationalist populism to highlight the specific threats to racial equality that arise when these two orientations are combined. Nationalist populism — especially when it is adopted by ethno-nationalists tends to limit the people to a particular racial, ethnic or religious group understood to be the only legitimate national group. Right-wing populists champion this ethno-nationalist conceptualization of the people using the increasingly multicultural nature of societies as evidence of an imminent threat against the survival and preservation of the nation.

• Right-wing nationalist populists regularly take the additional step of arguing that those identified as the people are long-suffering victims of multicultural society, and that multi-culturalism itself is a driver of socioeconomic decline for the people. The strategy, then, is not just to target elites, but also to target multi-culturalism and members of minority races, ethnicities and religions as all part of the problem. Racial, ethnic and religious minorities are relegated to the status of illegitimate interlopers whose interests are characterized as oppositional to those of the group exclusively designated as constituting the people.

• Nationalist populism often successfully advances heteronormative, patriarchal visions of the nation, and a version of traditional values that leads to serious violations against marginalized social groups (including women, gender and sexual minorities, and persons with disabilities), especially when those who are socially marginalized are also racial, ethnic or religious minorities.

• There is reason to believe that new forms of media have aided or amplified the influence of nationalist populism, and leaders of these movements have been especially successful at exploiting new media technology including social media for their benefit.

2. Global and regional trends: a racial equality analysis nationalist populism. Racist and xenophobic violence hate crimes and hate speech.