Vinícius Guilherme Rodrigues Vieira releases new book exploring the rise of far-right populist movements

DPIR alumnus Dr Vinícius Guilherme Rodrigues Vieira (DPhil International Relations, 2015) has written a new book on the rise of populism and backlash against globalisation in the US.

In Shaping Nations and Markets: Identity Capital, Trade and the Populist Rage – published by Routledge – he uses a mixed-methods approach to indicate the need to look beyond the redistributive effects of economic globalisation to make sense of the growing popularity of far-right populist movements.

Based on his doctoral dissertation, the book focuses on case studies of Brazil under former president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023), India with Hindu-nationalists led by prime-minister Narendra Modi (in power since 2014), and the US that wants Donald Trump back to power.

Through this Dr Rodrigues Viera argues that populism arises from the mobilisation of specific ethnic, racial, and religious segments with the aim of changing longstanding narratives of national identity. 

And he aims to demonstrate the need to take identities seriously when doing research in the fields of comparative and international political economy. 

Further, the book emphasises the need to go beyond regionally-focused comparisons. Although Brazil, India, and the US are located in different continents, they turned out to witness similar movements in markets and politics as globalisation and dominant narratives of national identity came to be subject to meaningful political contestation.

Dr Rodrigues Viera said: 

The book demonstrates that Global South emerging markets like Brazil and India are comparable with advanced industrial societies in the Global North and that far-right populism does not necessarily oppose trade liberalization, as the cases of Bolsonaro in Brazil and Modi in India suggest. 

“Hence, the key to understand populist politics lies in the struggles to define who has more identity capital—broadly defined as the form of power that individual and collective actors such as economic sectors have in function of being attached to the identity groups that define what it means to belong to a nation-state. 

“This, for instance, explains why democrats are struggling against republicans in the 2024 campaign notwithstanding the good performance of the American economy. In a nutshell, it is identity, stupid!"

Since Dr Rodrigues Vieira published the book, he has been working on projects to apply the concept of identity capital and its interplay with transnational economic flows to other contexts, 

He has also written and published on the role of regional powers as pivotal states and of international institutions such as multilateral development banks in the power contest between the US and China.