Heritage as power: History and tradition in constructing Brazil’s far-right populism

In this short video extract, Deborah Barros Leal Farias discusses the key points from her new Review of International Studies article - Heritage as power: History and tradition in constructing Brazil’s far-right populism co-authored with Guilherme Casarões

Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525000233

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Abstract

This article examines the use of heritage in the context of populism. It is interested in how populists’ division of society in an us-versus-them dichotomy and exclusionary politics intersect with the appeal to the past and the weaponised politicisation of history. More specifically, the analysis focuses on far-right populism’s selective embrace of nostalgia. To this end, we examine heritage politics under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist who ruled Brazil between 2019 and 2022. By surveying government speeches and policies, we developed a typology of the uses of heritage as a form of political power: (1) Heritage as historical revisionism, which has mainstreamed distorted and/or inaccurate history in the official narrative; (2) Heritage as identity repositioning, which has redefined core aspects of Brazil’s identity based on particular understandings of history and tradition; and (3) Heritage as alliance building, which has brought Brazil closer to some countries based on shared narratives and legacies. We find that the selective construction heritage has become an indissociable element of Jair Bolsonaro policies’ quest for domestic and international legitimacy.

Photo by Samuel Costa Melo on Unsplash