This conference is co-sponsored by The University of Wisconsin-Madison Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence for Comparative Populism, Havens Wright Center, New Politics Platform, and Transnational Institute (TNI).
This conference will begin on January 11th, 2021. View the conference website and register here (https://www.newpolitics2021.org/).
Over the last two decades, each wave of emancipatory politics around the globe has encountered significant reversals and setbacks when faced with the structural power and logic of capital and the state. And while the radical left has enjoyed moments of electoral and ideological resurgence in parts of the world, the main beneficiaries of the crisis of neoliberalism have been populist and authoritarian right forces. There is a great deal to be learned from investigating the fortunes of the left in electoral processes over the last two decades. In particular, it is important to analyze the strategic dilemmas faced by progressive parties and movements, along with an analysis of the possibilities, limitations, challenges and opportunities for a left transformative project in the 21st century.
The New Politics Conference 2021 will contribute to developing a theoretically informed analysis of the long-term challenges, prospects, promises and pitfalls of the left within a variety of national contexts. The conference will facilitate a dialogue between activists and scholars in the Americas and other regions of the world, with the goal of publishing a book and a series of related materials (short videos, podcasts, academic and journalistic articles, a dedicated website, etc.) that will be of long-term use to both activists and analysts.
The most important of the questions to be discussed are those that have long preoccupied the left, but which remain very much at the center of debate – most fundamentally, the content of the project or vision of a future society that it seeks to advance, and the kinds of state transformations, social bases, alliances, and organized collective capacities and political formations needed to bring it about.