The early twenty-first century is a time of monsters in the Global South.
What do these monsters look like?
Let me begin with those at work closest to home, namely in post-apartheid South Africa, where I live and work.
On 30 June 2026, the country’s streets were awash with hate. In cities like Johannesburg, Durban, and Pretoria, as well as in smaller towns, tens of thousands of people – mostly poor and working-class Black South Africans – marched behind slogans blaming undocumented migrants from other African countries for unemployment, crime, failing public services, and drug addiction. Their rallying cry was simple: Abahambe! – They Must Go! The day itself – 30 June – was the “deadline” that xenophobic organizations had set for undocumented migrants to leave the country. In the months leading up to this date, these organizations mobilized popular support for the idea of expulsion across the country. As the deadline approached, thousands of African foreigners flocked to their diplomatic missions to seek emergency repatriation. At least four people were killed before the marches took place, and countless others lost their livelihoods or fled their communities in fear.
Much about this moment was uniquely South African. Above all, the fact that the targets of hate, violence, and murder are Black African migrants, not White migrants from the Global North like me, has been a constant across similar upsurges in 2008, 2015, and 2019. This has led the Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe to speak of Afrophobia – a fear and hatred specifically of the Black African Other – as a distinctive predicament of South Africa’s post-apartheid order.
Yet it was also something more. Across the Global South, we have witnessed the rise of a monstrous far-right politics that rallies majoritarian people-nations against ominous Others while normalizing increasingly authoritarian political orders. This far right takes multiple forms: in some cases, such as Erdogan’s Turkey or Narendra Modi’s India, it manifests as entrenched far-right regimes with a firm grip on political power; in other cases, such as Brazil and the Philippines, it has found expression in emergent formations that have won power electorally without succeeding in consolidating durable regimes but still maintain a strong presence in politics and society. In yet other cases, such as South Africa, the far right is present in more embryonic forms, as reactionary social movements and parties that have begun to make their sway felt in the political domain and throughout the social fabric.
I refer to these political monstrosities as Southern authoritarian populism, and the purpose of this essay is to provide a politically enabling diagnosis of it. My argument is not simply that authoritarian populism has appeared in different countries across the Global South. It is that these diverse trajectories are part of an interconnected turn toward the far right across the Global South. Rather than looking at these regimes, parties, and movements in ways that make despair convincing, I want to present a reading that makes hope possible.
This begs an obvious question: where do we find the critical intellectual resources that enable us to untangle the politics of the new far right in the Global South? My search for an answer to this question has led me to two major conclusions. The first of these is that standard academic perspectives on autocratization and far-right populism have little to offer us. Studies of autocratization show us how strongman leaders eviscerate democratic institutions, procedures, and norms. Populism studies have painted vivid portraits of how these leaders perform far-right politics as a distinctive political style. However, neither of these perspectives can tell us much about the real questions we should be asking if we want to understand Southern authoritarian populism from a progressive and radical perspective and in a way that allows us to counteract it.
So what are the questions that we have to ask? They are questions about the political economy that has generated the precarious working classes that align with the far right; about the structures of feeling, simultaneously aspirational and anxious, that the far right has been capable of harnessing within this political economy; and they are questions about the ideological work that articulates diverse social forces into revanchist people-nations and produces consent from below to projects that ultimately serve the interests of economic and political elites.
This brings me to the second conclusion I have reached in thinking about these questions, which is that the work of the Jamaican-born cultural theorist, public intellectual, and activist Stuart Hall stands us in good stead as we search for the kind of insurgent epistemic gain that allows us a glimpse of possible points of entry into a counterhegemonic response to these far-right formations.
What I draw from Stuart Hall is, above all, his commitment to what he called conjunctural analysis. Conjunctural analysis is a way of making sense of moments of deep organic crisis, when accumulation strategies stagnate, existing forms of governance and political representation begin to break down, and dominant ideologies no longer secure popular consent. These are not separate developments. Rather, they are contradictions that are knotted together in conjunctures where a given form of hegemony unravels. This throws up a political terrain on which social movements from below contend with movements from above as powerful and wealthy groups act to remake their hegemony.
Hall called these movements from above hegemonic projects. Their aim is not simply to win elections but to remake society. They dismantle old hegemonic formations, forge new historic blocs that unite elite and popular forces, cultivate new political identities and new forms of common sense, and ultimately find pathways from civil society to the state where they implement programmes that reshape society. Practising his work at a safe distance from the high-level abstractions of Marxist theory, Hall focused on understanding how exactly these hegemonic projects do their work, precisely so that it might be possible to counteract them.
Hall never defined conjunctural analysis in the abstract. Instead, he practised it. Above all, he practised it through a sustained critical engagement with how the New Right in Britain, helmed by Margaret Thatcher, articulated what he called authoritarian populism as a hegemonic project. This project transformed British economic life, politics, and society in crucial ways during the 1970s and 1980s.
I don’t intend to map the arc of this body of work in this essay, but I’ll outline its main insights as these are eminently useful for thinking about the new far right in the Global South. Authoritarian populism, Hall argued, emerged in response to the crisis of post-war capitalism and the hegemonic order that had governed it. Breaking with the post-war settlement built around Keynesianism and the welfare state, the New Right fused advocacy for a turn to free markets with a reactionary ideology centred on a conservative imaginary of the nation, the family, order, and authority. Within this hegemonic project, the British people were imagined as a hardworking, law-abiding, and quintessentially White majority, against its Other – an enemy within composed of countercultural outsiders, welfare scroungers, left-wing radicals, and a criminal underclass of Black urban youth. This enemy would be brought to heel by the long arm of the law, so that the deserving people-nation could live safely and securely and benefit from the magic of the marketplace.
As a hegemonic project, Thatcher’s authoritarian populism was incredibly successful. From 1979 onwards, Thatcher and the Conservative Party won three consecutive general elections and implemented a profound neoliberalization of Britain’s political economy. That restructuring is why Britain today is one of the most unequal societies in the Global North, where the richest 10 per cent of the population hold some 45 per cent of the country’s total wealth, while the poorest 50 per cent are left with as little as 10 per cent. Deep inequality is precisely what neoliberal success looks like.
The key to this success was the ability of authoritarian populism to construct a historic bloc that crossed class lines. Thatcher’s project was not just supported by the country’s economic elites; it also won substantial support among working-class voters, at the same time as it defeated organized labour, above all in the miners’ strike in the mid-1980s. Hall was very clear in his analysis that this achievement was not the result of some kind of false consciousness laying siege to the British working class. On the contrary, authoritarian populism won active consent far beyond the country’s elite classes because it spoke to real problems, real lived experiences, and real contradictions that working-class communities struggled with. It did so not only at the level of material interests, but also at the level of identity, subjectivity, and feeling. In this way, and through sustained ideological work, it articulated a new popular common sense that aligned ordinary people’s aspirations and anxieties with the policies and class strategies of the right.
Hall’s methodological ethos provides a point of departure for understanding the time of monsters in the Global South.
My argument begins with a simple claim: far-right regimes, parties, and movements are advancing across the Global South because we are passing through an interregnum in which, as Antonio Gramsci put it, the old is dying and the new cannot be born. What do I mean by this? I mean the following: the present is not a moment in which the Global South is rising. On the contrary, it is a moment of deep transregional crisis.
But isn’t this claim counter-intuitive? Over the past three decades, countries across the Global South have become increasingly important in the world economy, and they have become more assertive at the level of geopolitics as the old Western-dominated order has given way to a multipolar world. Indeed, many have celebrated these developments as marking a new phase of anti-imperial advance in the early twenty-first century. So why do I insist that we are living through a Southern interregnum instead?
Let’s start with the fact that middle-income countries in the Global South are home to more than 70 per cent of all poor people in the world today. This poverty is not the result of an absolute lack of resources. On the contrary, it is the product of how the gains from economic growth have been distributed – in short, poverty in Southern middle-income countries is the result of inequality. Since the 1990s, the richest 10 per cent in these countries have captured an ever-larger share of national income while accumulating a vastly disproportionate share of private wealth. At the same time, the share of national income going to workers in the form of wages has steadily declined. That is hardly accidental. It is the predictable outcome of neoliberal growth strategies that have depended on the super-exploitation of labour.
The result is that working-class life across much of the Global South has become increasingly precarious. Wages are low. Stable employment is scarce. Social mobility has stalled. For millions of people, dignity and security remain elusive despite decades of economic growth. At the same time, many middle-income countries remain trapped in the lower reaches of global value chains, competing through cheap labour rather than technological upgrading. In short, neoliberalism has entered a zombie phase. Its developmental promise has been exhausted, but it continues to stagger on.
Across the Global South, disillusionment with zombie neoliberalism has erupted in successive waves of popular protest, from the Arab uprisings of the early 2010s to today’s Gen Z revolts across Asia and Africa. Here we arrive at the heart of the Southern interregnum: a profound disconnection between the two imperatives that every capitalist state must somehow reconcile – accumulation and legitimation. This crisis of legitimation demands a response from above. Southern authoritarian populism is precisely that. It is a hegemonic project that seeks to rebuild consent for a neoliberal order whose developmental promise has long since died, but which stubbornly refuses to lie down.
How does Southern authoritarian populism do this? The answer to this question will emerge from a comparative conjunctural analysis of the entrenched form of these hegemonic projects (Turkey and India, where Erdogan and Modi have established durable regimes that have transformed both state and economy) with their emergent form (the Philippines and Brazil, where authoritarian populism has held power more tenuously, but remains a potent political force) and their more embryonic form in South Africa.
Southern authoritarian populism operates with ideologies that pivot on constructions of the people-nation as an authentic, virtuous collective defined through markers such as religion, race, ethnicity, moral character, or sexuality. For example, in Erdogan’s Turkey, the people-nation – the millet – is portrayed as consisting of pious and hardworking Sunni Muslims with deep roots in the country’s Anatolian heartland and Ottoman past. In Modi’s India, the people-nation is the country’s Hindu majority, which the ruling party and the wider Hindu nationalist movement want to restore to its ancient civilizational glory. For both Duterte in the Philippines and Bolsonaro in Brazil, the people-nation was imagined as consisting of decent, diligent, and, above all, law-abiding citizens.
These people-nations are portrayed as being under threat from a range of internal enemies that are braided together into a single antagonistic Other that may encompass religious minorities, subordinated racial and ethnic groups, queer communities, criminals, political dissenters, and old corrupt elites. In Erdogan’s authoritarian populism, the main antagonists of the people-nation are westernized metropolitan elites and a democratic opposition that is stigmatized as terrorists. Modi’s Hindu nationalism posits India’s Muslim minority as the principal enemy within, while Duterte and Bolsonaro trained their sights on criminalized underclasses – alleged drug users and dealers in the case of the former, and the racialized urban poor in the case of the latter.
Within these ideological frames, the coercive capacities of the state are represented as necessary instruments for protecting the people-nation from these perceived threats. This has very real repressive and violent consequences, whether in the form of judicial persecution of political opponents, legislation that violates minority rights, vigilante attacks on minority groups, or, in the case of Duterte’s Philippines, an extrajudicial war on drugs that resulted in as many as 30,000 killings. More fundamentally, this ideological representation of coercion becomes a vehicle of legitimation. It produces a popular authoritarian consensus in which strongman leaders appear as the only figures capable of restoring order, defending the people-nation, and delivering renewed prosperity.
To serve its hegemonic ends, Southern authoritarian populism puts these ideologies to work by articulating diverse social forces into historic blocs capable of underpinning bids for political power. This work is carried out through organizational infrastructures that exist both in the form of real-world networks – such as the century-old Hindu nationalist movement in India and the more recent but similarly extensive Islamist movement in Turkey – and in digital spaces, where social media platforms enable these projects to reach and mobilize the people-nation.
The defining feature of these historic blocs is that they cut across class lines. In varying degrees, Southern authoritarian populism has consistently won the consent of poor and working-class groups. In Turkey, voter support for Erdogan’s AKP has never fallen below 46 per cent among the poorest quintile and 39 per cent among the second poorest quintile of the electorate. In India, the BJP has increased electoral support from the working poor, Dalits, and lower-caste groups to such an extent that the party commands more than 40 per cent of the Hindu vote. Although Duterte’s campaign initially resonated most strongly with Filipino elites and the middle classes, his victory ultimately depended on support from the urban poor. Bolsonaro, meanwhile, won Brazil’s 2018 election by making major inroads among working-class voters who had experienced modest upward mobility during the years of Workers’ Party rule.
This has happened despite the fact that these hegemonic projects have remained firmly committed to neoliberal economic policies that have deepened inequality and precarity. How do we explain this paradox? To answer that question, we have to consider something that Stuart Hall took very seriously, namely structures of feeling. More specifically, we have to understand the structures of feeling that saturate the lifeworlds of precarious working classes in an age of zombie neoliberalism.
Ethnographic studies of working-class communities across Turkey, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and the Global South more broadly reveal a remarkably consistent pattern. Life under zombie neoliberalism is animated by an entanglement of anxiety and aspiration. People aspire to upward mobility and material affluence, believing they can attain it by acting as entrepreneurs in the marketplace. At the same time, they live with the constant fear of sliding into absolute poverty – of losing what little they have and the status that comes with it.
Across the Global South, popular entrepreneurial aspirations are unlikely to be realized precisely because of how neoliberal markets work. Conversely, anxieties about social decline are a clear and present danger. All it takes is a global market downturn that wipes out a fragile micro-enterprise, or a corporate decision to relocate production in pursuit of higher profits that costs someone their job.
It is on this terrain that Southern authoritarian populism does its most important ideological work. It shapes aspirational affects into commitment to the strongman leaders who promise to guide the people-nation on its path to greater prosperity. The dreams deferred will come true, if only the people remain loyal to the leader, the state and the government, the party, the movement. It channels anxious sentiments into resentment against the Others of the people-nation, who are cast as the folk devils responsible for holding ordinary people back and taking from them what is rightfully theirs. If only the folk-devil is defeated, expelled, or erased, the people-nation will rise to greatness. In this way, structures of feeling are translated into a reactionary and revanchist common sense.
This is precisely what happened in Brazil. In the urban peripheries of São Paulo and other major cities, many working-class families had experienced modest improvements in their lives during the years of Workers’ Party government. They bought household appliances, sent their children to university, and began to imagine a more secure future. But when economic crisis struck in the mid-2010s, many of those gains unravelled. Jobs disappeared, debt mounted, violent crime remained pervasive, and optimism gave way to anxiety. That anxiety soon found political expression on the country’s streets, where mass demonstrations gathered momentum around demands for the ouster of President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party.
As these protests crystallized into a broader wave of anti-petismo – hostility towards the Workers’ Party and everything it had come to represent – Jair Bolsonaro emerged as the figurehead of Brazil’s new far right. His appeal extended beyond denunciations of the Workers’ Party. He redirected frustration towards the figure of the criminal. Bolsonaro promised that decent, law-abiding Brazilians could once again prosper if only the state unleashed its coercive power against those cast as dangerous vagabonds. This vengeful promise resonated with millions of Brazilians and Bolsonaro went on to win 55 per cent of the vote in the 2018 presidential election. This is how Southern authoritarian populism articulates structures of feeling into reactionary common sense and how reactionary common sense becomes electoral power.
Bolsonaro’s grip on power did not last. After losing the 2022 presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the Workers’ Party, he refused to accept defeat. He is now serving a 27-year prison sentence for his role in orchestrating the failed coup attempt that followed. Duterte, too, is now out of office, although under very different circumstances. Following the end of his presidency in 2022, he is now on trial before the International Criminal Court in The Hague on charges arising from his bloody war on drugs. However, this does not mean that Southern authoritarian populism is a spent force in these countries: in Brazil, Bolsonaro’s son, Flavio, spearheaded the far-right movement that congealed around his father, and ran in the October 2026 presidential election, also losing to Lula. In the Philippines, the country’s new president, Bongbong Marcos, has mobilized the same authoritarian nostalgia – and many of the same political constituencies – that helped bring Duterte to power in 2016, while Duterte’s daughter, Sara Duterte, who is currently the country’s vice-president, is using her father’s enduring popularity with the Philippine electorate to make her own bid for the presidency in May 2028.
Southern authoritarian populism in its emergent form is precisely that – emerging. It advances and retreats, develops new organizational forms, cultivates new leaders, and prepares for its next bid for power. If the entrenched authoritarian populism of Erdogan and Modi shows us anything, it is what emergent authoritarian populism can become: durable regimes that transform democracies into electoral autocracies while deepening the neoliberal order and the precarity which it produces.
South Africa brings the argument full circle. Xenophobia has haunted the country’s democratic transition for nearly three decades. Since 2008, close to 700 people have been killed in xenophobic violence. But something new has happened in recent years. Xenophobic nationalism has become the organizing principle of an embryonic far-right ecosystem that stretches from the streets into party politics and, increasingly, the state. To understand why this has happened, we need to return to three themes: political economy, structures of feeling, and ideology.
South Africa’s post-apartheid political economy has produced exactly the kind of conjuncture I have been describing. More than three decades after the democratic transition, it remains the most unequal country in the world. The richest 10 per cent of the population receives two-thirds of all income and owns more than 85 per cent of all personal wealth. The bottom half receives just 5.6 per cent of national income and owns less than nothing: it lives in chronic debt. These inequalities remain profoundly racialized. Nearly three quarters of Black South Africans live below the country’s upper-bound poverty line, compared to little more than one per cent of White South Africans. At the same time, unemployment has become a permanent feature of everyday life, affecting more than four in ten people when discouraged work seekers are included.
These inequalities have persisted throughout the democratic era. Political liberation did not dismantle the structures of economic power inherited from colonialism and apartheid, and three decades of neoliberal restructuring have done little to change that reality. For many years, the ANC nevertheless retained popular consent through its liberation legacy and formidable organizational reach. But as poverty, unemployment, and inequality persisted, that hegemony gradually unravelled. Poor communities increasingly took to the streets to protest failing services, exclusion, and the absence of decent work. The ANC lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in 2024. South Africa, in other words, has entered precisely the kind of legitimation crisis that creates fertile ground for Southern authoritarian populism.
Amid this overwhelming precarity, young Black South Africans are trying to build lives in conditions of chronic insecurity. Anxieties are rife in these efforts, but recent ethnographic work by South African anthropologist Hannah Dawson shows how life-making in Johannesburg’s townships is also animated by aspirations. The young township men at the centre want more than survival. They want the dignity, security, and material comforts that democratic citizenship seemed to promise. But when those aspirations collide with an economy that offers few stable opportunities, frustration searches for an object. That object is often the African migrants living alongside South Africans in the townships. They are blamed for driving down wages and worsening working conditions because they are seen as willing to take any job on offer.
These popular resentments create an opening for xenophobic authoritarian populism to perform its ideological work. This is done by actors that extend from street movements such as Operation Dudula and March and March to political parties like the Patriotic Alliance, ActionSA, and, increasingly, Jacob Zuma’s MK Party. As the sociologist Jason Love argues, what binds these different actors together is a common ideological language. South Africa’s deep social crisis is attributed to the figure of the undocumented African migrant. This folk-devil is accused of stealing jobs, overwhelming public services, driving down wages, and bringing crime and drugs into South African communities. A crisis rooted in the country’s political economy becomes a crisis of illegal immigration. The political solution follows naturally: close the borders, deport the outsiders, and restore the nation to its rightful owners.
South Africa’s authoritarian populism remains embryonic. It has yet to construct a durable historic bloc and is still at some distance from capturing state power. But that does not make it politically insignificant. On the contrary, its ideological language is already reshaping South African politics. As xenophobic nationalism has gathered momentum, parties across the political spectrum have adopted tougher positions on immigration, while the Government of National Unity has tightened the country’s border regime. During the mobilizations of 2026, there were also unmistakable signs that the boundaries of the people-nation were beginning to shift again, as ethnonationalist appeals increasingly pitted Zulu South Africans against other Black communities. And all of this is unfolding at a time when growing numbers of South Africans – especially younger people – are turning away from electoral politics altogether. If faith in democratic participation continues to erode, the appeal of strongman leaders and authoritarian solutions may well grow stronger. South Africa, in other words, is no exception to the time of monsters that has descended on the Global South.
Understanding Southern authoritarian populism as a hegemonic project makes hope possible rather than despair convincing. The reason is simple.
When we understand Southern authoritarian populism as a hegemonic project – even in its most entrenched forms – what comes into view is not the overwhelming power of charismatic authoritarians who rule over populations that have succumbed to irrationality. Instead, we see a political project that has been painstakingly constructed through interventions into a specific conjuncture. And the hopeful thing about this is simple: anything that has been made can also be unmade.
The key thing that Southern authoritarian populism has made – or, in South Africa’s case, has begun to make – is historic blocs that bind elite interests and popular classes into revanchist people-nations. What the far right has articulated, democratic counterhegemonic projects must disarticulate. That work has to proceed along several interconnected fronts.
The first is political economy. Southern authoritarian populism has flourished where capitalist elites have appropriated a wildly disproportionate share of the wealth created by the working classes. If the far right has built support on the ruins of zombie neoliberalism, then counterhegemonic alternatives cannot simply promise a kinder version of the same economic model. Instead, they must confront the class power of capital and build economies that guarantee security, dignity, and universal access to the public goods people need to live with dignity.
Radical structural reforms are therefore essential. But they cannot be conceived in purely material terms. They must go hand in hand with the work of disarticulating the people-nations that Southern authoritarian populism has built. Against the cruel optimism of believing that everyone can achieve individual prosperity through the marketplace, democratic counterhegemonic projects have to offer a different horizon: a vision of a community of life rooted in collective security, shared prosperity, and the expansion of human needs, capacities, and freedoms. In doing so, they must cultivate political subjectivities that reject majoritarianism, hierarchy, and exclusion, while forging new solidarities across the many lines of division that separate working people and subaltern groups. That is how new historic blocs are built.
Finally, counterhegemonic politics cannot be confined to the terrain of elections. If Southern authoritarian populism teaches us anything, it is that the most durable political victories are won long before ballots are cast. They are built patiently across the institutions and infrastructures of civil society – in neighbourhoods, workplaces, religious organizations, social movements, and digital spaces – before they are consolidated in the state. The tragic trajectory of too many popular uprisings in the Southern interregnum has been that once movements have demobilized, whether after winning concessions or toppling governments, reaction has regrouped and counterrevolution has followed. If Southern authoritarian populism is to be defeated, democratic counterhegemony must take root in ongoing popular struggles. It must be woven into the everyday work of organizing around the demands that have animated the great revolts of our time: bread, freedom, and social justice.
