Until recently, populism hid a double-bind. For it carried with it two perfectly contradictory sets of associations.

Three poems by Omair Bhat

How much do the multitude of Muslims and non-Muslims hate the Islamic State (IS), formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)? Let us count the ways.

Posters depicting hordes of people queuing, snake-like – we would be forgiven for thinking that these were produced by deeply intolerant regimes of times gone by. Sadly, these images made their rounds in 2016, in the midst of the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union.

With the resurgence of the far right across wide swathes of the European continent, Brexit and the US Elections of November 2016, populism has become a publishing cottage industry.

The AfD’s sudden rise has much to do with the specific history of German politics in recent decades and also with a very specific German-ness of its agenda. But its rise would never have been possible without the previous rise of other right-wing populist parties in Germany’s neighbouring countries.

There are many unexamined assumptions about populism that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Bearing this in mind, here is a List of ten populist moments that can balance the current Brexit- and Trump-dominated headlines. 

At the age of 22, I travelled to those regions of the world that I had read about, and heard about since childhood; how strange and novel their ways of life were! That included the people of Pacific Islands, extreme north and extreme south of India, the inhabitants of thick African jungles and gypsies from Alaska to Siberia.