Editors note: This interview is a transcription of our “Political Science Podcast” hosted by Enes Kulenović with Marlene Laruelle, which took place on May 27th 2025. Marlene Laruelle is a professor of political science at George Washington University in the United States. The interview is available on the website of the Annals of the Croatian Political Science Society: https://analihpd.hr/en/epizoda-15-illiberalism-marlene-laruelle/
Enes Kulenović:
Professor Laruelle, welcome to Croatia and welcome to our podcast. Let me begin with the concept of “illiberalism”, the concept that's central to your recent research. Your approach is to think about illiberalism more as an ideology rather than just a regime type. So can you explain in a bit more detail your understanding of illiberalism? What are the benefits of your approach to illiberalism as first and foremost an ideology?
Marlene Laruelle:
Thank you. Yes, that's a great point because that's a really important element to launch our discussion. So, the literature on illiberalism really arose from a feeling that the concept of populism was not allowing us to understand what was happening in our own societies. And so, it was a way to move away from populism and to capture something that was closer to a political project rather than a political style, which is what populism was mostly about. And so, when the concept of illiberal democracy emerged in the late 90s, in the 2000s, it was indeed describing a transitional political regime which is not really a classic liberal democracy. And then globally, the term began move from an adjective to a noun to become “illiberalisms” and that's where I really became interested in it. I wanted to push for that concept because for me, the question is not to study it so much as a regime but to study a new political order that is proposed. Therefore it's an ideology more than a regime.
Of course, you have a lot of overlap between an ideology and a regime. But for me, one of the key elements that shows that it's worth looking at it through an ideological frame is that you have an illiberal political offer in western democratic liberal systems. So they are not necessarily changing the nature of the regime, they are just one among many political offers inside a democratic system. Of course, once these illiberal forces are in power, they may or may not be changing the institutions. So then you have a change of regime and then you can discuss possible regime transformations. So for me, illiberalism, it's really an ideology. It's a political offer which is criticizing liberalism, either the political philosophy or liberalism in practice, as it exists in our society.
And it is offering a kind of counter-project which has several defining elements that we are testing on the ground with all the diversity of illiberal offers. They insist on executive power. They are against minority rights. Nation-state sovereignty should be reasserted, reaffirmed against supranational institutions. Foreign policy should be transactional and realist, so they do not support a rule-based international order. The nation should have some cultural homogeneity, so no multiculturalism. And there are some traditional values that should be respected and protected, so no more progressivism or so-calledwokeideology. So those are the core elements that I think help us identify illiberalism as an ideology.
Enes Kulenović:
Great, thank you. This is a great starting point. Next, I am interested in the causes of the global illiberal upsurge. In your writings, you find explanations that look at illiberalism exclusively as a sort of a backlash against liberal norms, or as grievances of either privileged groups or maybe even previous working classes, groups that are no longer drawn to left discourse. And you find these types of explanations a bit too simplistic. So what, in your your view, are some of the main causes of the recent electoral success and discursive success of illiberal political actors?
Marlene Laruelle:
Yes, we have illiberal forces succeeding in many different contexts. Central and Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the US, but also Turkey, India, Philippines, Brazil. You can really take a lot of countries, with very different political cultures, social and economic conditions. To understand this, you need to look at a combination of systemic factors. So the social economic factor is indeed a well studied one. That refers to the end of industrial modernity, a fragmentation experienced in many of our social groups. There is rising economic inequality and people are losing their sense of belonging to a class. People don't find their place in society and they feel that they are not heard enough. So that's one package, one explanation.
I don't think it's enough. I think that indeed you need to have other explanations, which are entering into our framework. One of them being that, simultaneously, as people are experiencing a feeling of fragility in their social and economic realities, they are asked to accept a very rapid change of value systems and of hierarchy inside society. And so that aspect is about a cultural backlash. I think this makes sense if it's combined with the social and economic one. You ask people too many things at the same time and that may be difficult. And then I think you have two other key elements.
One is that we function in a kind of postmodern phase, what has been defined as “liquid modernity”, a world where everything is centered on our individual identity. So we exist as an individual identity. And we believe that we should be at the core of our interpretation of the world. This means that if we are a group of fragmented, atomized individuals. It then becomes very difficult to create a political project and to feel we share common goods with other citizens. So that's another element which is more structural to our society.
Another one would be that we live in a world where we are asked to do everything very rapidly and in an immediate way. And so this kind of immediacy that is coming with the internet, social media, cell-phone culture is in contradiction with the fact that democracy is slow by definition. To take democratic decisions, you need a slow process with checks and balances. So we place a contradiction in front of our citizens, where they have to be very fast in many aspects of their lives. They have to be responsive and reactive all the time. And at the same time, we ask them to understand that democracy is slow and cannot deliver immediately, which is a contradiction.
And the last structural element is that the media ecosystem has been totally transformed. And we usually mention social media, but I think it's broader than that. The commercialization of newspapers, right? The commercialization of newspapers, the 24-7 news channels which are largely coming from the private segment of the media market are functioning in such a polarizing way. In order to make money, you need to say things that are polarizing, that are dividing us, that are uncivil, impolite. So it's creating a public space that is not open to consensus. On the contrary, it is dividing us. And I think that is also a key element in that we don't have any public space as citizens that is not largely dominated by what is dividing us. So I think all of that explains why for illiberal forces, it's so easy to find a market because the tools are there for them.
Enes Kulenović:
Yes, thank you. This also explains why these simplified explanations of a phenomenon such as illiberalism are not satisfactory because we have to take all of these layers into account and their mutual connections. So one of the main themes of the current, it seems to me, both academic and political debate on illiberalism is the relationship between illiberal ideology and democracy. There are influential political thinkers such as Jan Werner Müller or Nadia Urbinati who argue that there is no real democracy without adherence to at least some basic liberal norms, such as checks and balances, or independent media, or respect of the rights of minorities, or certain inclusive public policies. But in their view, illiberal democracy is an oxymoron. It's an impossibility. But in contrast, the advocates of the illiberal option argue that liberal democracy distorts true democracy. By taking power and decision-making out of the hands of the people and actually putting it in the hands of a self-interested liberal elite, a kind of fake democracy emerges. So I was wondering what is your view on the relationship between illiberalism and democracy?
Marlene Laruelle:
That's a pretty complicated question because very often when you look at the argument you just summarized very well, you can see that you have a very abstract definition of democracy and sometimes a very concrete example. So this mix is used as an argument to say that democracy is not functioning or democracy is fake. So it's a question of scale. Are we talking about the kind of archetypal liberal democracy that is an abstract idea but that doesn't exist in reality? Or are we talking about liberal democracies as they are functioning with all their limitations and all their dysfunction? Very often, my impression is that those who are defending democracy by saying democracy can only be liberal are in fact defending an archetypal democracy. Indeed, on paper, it should be like that. But in reality, liberal democracy has a lot of shortcomings that we all experience as citizens.
One of the big shortcomings and a kind of elephant in the room is that we don't have accountability for the private sector. So what kind of liberal democracy is it if a large part of our world, the private sector world, is not under any kind of democratic control? So I think what the illiberal or post-liberal figures are trying to say is that, indeed, you have over the years a kind of transformation of liberal democracies. They became more and more elitist, more and more technocratic, unable to integrate a large mass of the population. There is a mechanism which reproduces elites. And this is true. Sociologically speaking, it's indeed how it is. And liberal democracies have been giving too much power to the judiciary up to the point that the executive power, which is the legitimate body, the one that is elected with the legislative body, is sometimes prevented from taking decisions because the judiciary opposes it.
So I think all these tensions, in a sense, are normal. They should be there because a democracy is about checks and balances and you should have tensions between these elements. But of course, depending on the position you take, you can think that liberal democracy has failed, or you can say that tension is part of things as they should be. There is no way we would have an easy consensus and everybody would be happy. We need a way to manage a plurality of opinions. And that goes together with tension.
Enes Kulenović:
Thank you. So apart from theory, I think our audience is always interested in how political scientists and political theorists work. So I want to turn to two projects that you have recently been involved in. So, you are leading the “Illiberalism Studies Program” at George Washington University. And also, you were the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism which was published last year and which very quickly became the main reference point for all scholars who are working on the topic. So I was just wondering if you can briefly tell our audience a bit more about the “Illiberalism Studies Program” that you established at George Washington University and also editing the Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism.
Marlene Laruelle:
Yes, absolutely, so the program was created in 2020. So, when I launched it, the notion of illiberalism was just at its beginning. So I immediately wanted to push for my perspective, that illiberalism is an ideology, not a regime. This position was contested at the time. I was feeling very much in the minority. Now, I feel like the field has become much more established.
Enes Kulenović:
You have been vindicated.
Marlene Laruelle:
Yes (laughter). Because there has been so much electoral success of illiberal forces. Media have been using the notion of illiberal much more, sometimes as an adjective, sometimes as a noun, with good and bad definitions. And of course, Trump's second electoral victory has generated much more recognition that there is a political project here. It's not just some kind of populist style of communication. The program has been built as a very horizontal platform where I try to attract colleagues who work in different fields because I really believe that illiberalism should be studied only through a multi-disciplinary way. So attracting colleagues from different fields and telling them: okay, let's build a research agenda, a research axis for you where you can have people you consider interesting, new scholars bringing new research, so pioneering different fields and generating research that we then publish on our website.
And that kind of model, of a hub, a start-up, has been pretty efficient in demonstrating that you can use the notion of illiberalism in different disciplines and you can test the notion. We are also based on what we call public scholarship. We care. We have a journal that is a peer-reviewed journal. But the majority of our publications are short, five to six pages, where scholars have to be able to frame their main argument in a simpler way, without jargon. So that they can try to speak to a broader audience and to speak across disciplines. Everybody should be able to read your paper, even if they come from another discipline. And so the idea is to create common goods, common knowledge which can be shared, something that is not just for a peer-reviewed academic journal which is difficult to read if you don't belong to that field.
Enes Kulenović:
Exclusive knowledge with a specialized language and for a very limited audience.
Marlene Laruelle:
Exactly. So we try to reach a broader audience. And after about five years, we published almost 400 short papers. And then came the Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism. I wanted to ask colleagues from different disciplines to test the concept in their own field, either in their discipline or in their country of choice, in various area studies. And I told them, here is my working definition. Feel free to say no to it, to say it doesn't work for your case studies, it doesn't work for your discipline. Or here is another definition that is more compelling to me. So we really played with testing the concept. We organized a lot of meetings for different sections of the handbook. It included about 45 people. So everybody could test their own concept. We really worked as a collective to make that volume. I hope people will read it. It's a huge book, so you cannot read it from page 1 to page 1000. You read some chapters. Each chapter looks at illiberalism in a certain field or in a certain country. And you can move on from there.
Enes Kulenović:
Your research is actually much broader than what we discussed so far. It also includes the study of specific cases of illiberal politics. And I was thinking of addressing two such cases from different parts of the world. First, a topic that you have extensively written about is the role that illiberal ideology plays in Russia. It's utilized by Putin's regime to justify his polices. The second case that I find interesting, and I know that you have also dealt with it, is the resurgence of illiberal thinking, often with a Catholic emphasis, that we can find in the writings of American political theorists such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. But I also think it is promoted by influential political figures such as US vice president J.D. Vance. Can you share with us some the main findings in these two cases where you applied your theoretical insights to the specific cases of illiberal politics.
Marlene Laruelle:
Yes, absolutely. So, indeed, I've been working on Russia for 25 years. Russia is a fascinating case because it's the precursor of illiberalism. It's the first country where liberalism arrived at the collapse of the Soviet Union in all its versions: political liberalism, economic liberalism, geopolitical liberalism. And it generated a very strong backlash. And so when Putin survived in power in 2000, he gradually moved away from some liberal norms, but in a very slow way. And I think at the beginning, he would define himself as a liberal conservative, not as someone who moved away entirely from liberalism. But then because he has been in power for 25 years and Russian society and the regime have been evolving a lot over this quarter century, you have a really unique case of gradually moving away from liberal norms up to building an ideology that is really shaped by illiberal values, as I defined them at the beginning.
It has really become an extreme case of illiberalism since the invasion of Ukraine. And he has been really skilled at using ideological storytelling to explain to the population why the regime is the best one, why Russia is unique, and why Russia should have the foreign policy it has, including the war with Ukraine and what they call a civilizational war with the West. So I was interested in studying this evolution and also the capacity of the Russian regime to co-opt a lot of ideological production of different sorts. This includes the religious, the secular, the ethno-nationalist, the imperial, the very old-fashioned one, the more post-modern one. And they have tried to create some kind of coherence gradually in terms of ideology, up to the point where you can now say that you have a certain state ideology in Russia. It is taught in schools and people are indoctrinated with an ideology that has become much more coherent than at the beginning.
And then the case of the US that you mentioned is also fascinating. I think we tend to be too obsessed with Trump, his transactional policies, the fact that he changes his opinion very often. We miss that beyond him, you really have not just Trump, but Trumpism. You have a political project that has been built gradually. It was not like that in 2016. It was really built after 2020. In fact, when Trump lost the election and was preparing his revenge, he collected a group of people who come from different ideological traditions, but who coalesced around Trump as the best strategy for them to gain power. And indeed, as you said, J.D. Vance is now the embodiment of Trumpism. He's at the core of several of these different ideological ecosystems. He was influenced by Catholicism. Indeed, many of these post-liberal thinkers are converted Catholics and Vance has himself converted to Catholicism, a kind of political conversion. He's also very much connected to right-wing technological circles, to Peter Thiel and the dark enlightenment tradition. So he is trying to merge these two big trends which are behind Trump's success. He is also connected to the MAGA world on some aspects. So he has the capacity to create a coherent brand of what Trumpism can be beyond Trump or even without Trump.
Enes Kulenović:
Yes, what's specifically interesting, and you described it very well, is this hybrid character of liberalism. When you think you caught it by its tail, it then grows another tail or another head. It's a moving ideology. And in today's lecture that you held at the Faculty of Political Science here in Zagreb, you also emphasized this hybrid moment, where it's very hard to define. And then the next day, this definition runs away from us because it's constantly a moving target.
Marlene Laruelle:
Yes, absolutely. I think it's a moving ideology because they have the capacity to innovate. They have been able to reopen their political imaginary. And once you reopen that, when nothing is taboo anymore, then a lot of things are possible. At least, it becomes possible to say various new things. Achieving them politically is harder. I also think illiberal forces have been very much connected to many subcultures. They are able to co-opt the wealth and the imagination of subcultures. And to turn them into political products. They are very much in the avant-garde. It maybe be a conservative or a reactionary avant-garde but it's a cultural avant-garde on many aspects. And indeed, they are transforming themselves faster than we can imagine. For example, even people like me, who were really following Trump's electoral campaign in 2024, did not see that big-tech had arrived politically in such a manner. No one saw Elon Musk arriving like that, right? No one saw all these dark enlightenment figures becoming so prominent. So, they indeed have this capacity. For me, its' really a sign that this is revolutionary. Because you need this kind of innovation, this permanent reinvention, like pushing the boundaries of what is possible. That is a sign that it's a revolution. And with revolution you also need to learn to reinvent yourself and react fast because it's going very fast.
Enes Kulenović:
That seems to me to explain what you mentioned in the beginning, which is the many faces of liberalism in different parts of the globe. In different societies, in completely different cultures, different reference points, but exactly this, that it is an avant-garde. And also, one thing that you mentioned in today's lecture, is the idea of understanding illiberalism as an ideology which is finding its space because liberal hegemony, not necessarily as a political system, but as a system of cultural symbols and political symbols has been eroding. Maybe, it does not exist anymore.
Marlene Laruelle:
Exactly, I think that is the key criterion. That's why I was always opposed to the idea that there is a binary. You either are liberal or illiberal. I think it's a graduation. It's a move away from liberalism understood in a normative sense. So, you may not have been following liberalism but you still had it as a kind of normative ideal. I think that cultural hegemony is over. Now, this doesn't mean that liberalism is dead. It means that it will have to reinvent itself in a space where they will be competing ideologically. And as we said, I think this is mostly due to domestic failure. Mostly just domestic exhaustion, right? What liberalism as a normative system could deliver doesn't function anymore. There are no solutions to the new challenges that our societies have to face. Liberalism does not offer these solutions. So it's still functioning by inertia, but it has lost its capacity to react to the transformation of our society. And that's why illiberal forces, since they have the capacity to refute the normative aspect, they are not on the inertia side. They are reopening their imagination. And that explains a large part of their electoral success.
Enes Kulenović:
Yes, that sounds very convincing. So, in conclusion, I wanted to ask you about your future research, but also, what do you see as some of the main topics in the future, topics which you hope might be expanded in the future, both by you and by other scholars.
Marlene Laruelle:
I see two or three big lines of research. One is the grassroots demand for illiberalism. This means looking at what psychology can add to our knowledge. So, looking at illiberal demands, why some constituencies consider illiberalism as a political project that makes sense to them. This means really going to the grassroots level.
Another aspect is also connected to the grassroots. This is looking at what I call “infrapolitics.” This means all the cultural aspects of our life through which we explain or we express our worldview and our set of values. These are things that we don't necessarily frame as politics, but they can still be political. So, the music we like, the movies we watch, the way we think we should be eating and taking care of our bodies and being healthy. There are many elements that have an ideological background. And I think this is a big and understudied aspect. It's our way of life. A way of life which expresses ideological values. And I think that's something that illiberal forces have been able to do. There is a kind of popular culture which shapes their vision of politics. Podcasts, for example. For the younger generation, politics will not go through classical elite figures or through political parties. It will be much more fluid. It will come from friends, from influencers, from “news-fluencers”.
Then, connected to this, new research is needed into everything related to technology. So, for example, the link between artificial intelligence and illiberalism. This is a new field of research that is opening up. And things are almost going too fast for us to study. But we have to consider the question of what democracy can be in a time of artificial intelligence.
Enes Kulenović:
That's great. That's a warning for political theorists like us to get out of our comfort zone. And not just read other political theorists and political philosophers, but also to throw our net much wider to try to understand a phenomenon like illiberalism.
Marlene Laruelle:
Exactly.
Enes Kulenović:
Well, Professor Laruelle, thank you very much for the conversation. And I'm sure our audience will really enjoy your insights.
Marlene Laruelle:
Thank you so much for your invitation.
