A Pathway to Dystopia: An Exploration into the Relationship between Populist Ideology and Necropolitical Regimes

Abstract

The recent television programme Years and Years followed a family in the UK where topics such as Trump's America, Brexit, and climate change were pertinent. It started as something many British watchers could empathise with (and even laugh along with). Subtly, this deteriorated into a dystopian future and successfully depicted a reality whereby populist politics progressed into a necropolitical state. Each subsequent reduction in civil rights created a domino effect, eventually leading to hidden concentration camps across the country. This essay aims to explore the relationship between populism and necropolitics. Whilst Years and Years was a fictional TV series, the Calais 'Jungle', the thousands drowning in the Mediterranean, and Trump's family separation and containment policies at the US-Mexico border, are all evidence of populist politics relating to necropolitics. This depiction of populism straying into necropolitics is one which should be taken seriously, and this essay explores what it is about populist ideologies which create this risk. Further, it determines that populism as a concept is not singularly responsible. There is some valid argument that globalism, or more specifically anti-globalism, has contributed to the rise in populism, and still carries the shadow of colonialism. Eurocentrism dominates, and "others" are left in deathscapes and used as convenient, non-European scapegoats. Overall, there is a complex postcolonial climate of globalisation, which operates as a catalyst for the boundaries between populism and necropolitics to blur.