Calls for Papers

Pléyade. Revista de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales opens the call for articles for issue No. 39 (January–June 2027): "Far Right, Authoritarianisms, Populisms? Naming the Fascist Moment of Contemporary Politics"

We are witnessing a profound transformation of the global political field. Across regions, far-right forces have gained electoral, institutional, and cultural ground with a speed and intensity unseen in decades. This is not a sudden eruption but the outcome of a long process of reorganisation and strategic learning among reactionary forces—forces rooted in historical fascisms, dictatorships, and authoritarianisms, and in the ultra-Catholic, evangelical, and neoliberal networks that consolidated power throughout the twentieth century. As Sonia Corrêa argues, we are living through a fascist moment of neoliberalism, in which open violence is no longer the first resort: power is instead pursued through democratic means, then used to transform the rules from within (in Escales, 2026).

This call for papers seeks to critically examine these processes and the forces that drive them, identifying the symbolic and material infrastructures that sustain them across their epistemic, affective, and temporal dimensions, as well as their legal, media, and economic ones. At the same time, we cannot homogenise such heterogeneous forces and movements under a single definition. Following Leigh A. Payne, Julia Zulver, and Simón Escoffier (2023), it is worth distinguishing at least three forms of mobilization—countermovements, uncivil movements, and radical neoliberal mobilizations—which, despite sharing a common adversary (those who attack the social, economic, and cultural rights of historically marginalized populations) and similar repertoires of action, cannot be understood as a uniform bloc.

The same caution applies to how we name these processes and the forces driving them, which are not concentrated exclusively on the far right. Terms such as fascism, populism, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism—along with their prefixes (neo, techno, post, etc.)—are used in various ways to describe the current state of global geopolitics (Sabsay, 2026). This has led authors such as Alyosxa Tudor and Miriam Ticktin (2021) to propose a shift in analytical framework: rather than focusing on far-right actors, they suggest attending to “right-wing times”, understood as a global moment in which the rise of fascism is fostered not only by the right. The analysis, in this view, should focus not on the positionality of those who intervene, but on the discursive borders of the debate itself.

This perspective is particularly useful in analyses of contemporary anti-gender politics, where “in both left/liberal and right-wing iterations, anti-gender and anti-trans politics frequently overlap with anti-immigration and anti-Palestine rhetoric and with attacks on fields of knowledge like critical race theory and intersectionality” (Tudor, 2026, p. 623). These varieties of uses and analytical frameworks challenge us to remain attentive to how the territories and political struggles in turn define the boundaries of the phenomenon we are studying.

Recent scholarship on these processes focuses on the contest over language — specifically, the appropriation of discursive repertoires historically associated with feminist, left, and LGBTIQ+ liberation struggles (Vivaldi 2024; Calderaro 2025). Terms like “anti-rights” and “backlash” are common but problematic, since both reduce these authoritarian forces to a merely reactive phenomenon (Corrêa et al., 2023). As Corrêa argues, “anti-rights” is insufficient: these forces do not simply deny rights but contest what a right is, who holds it, and how constitutions and international instruments — such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — should be interpreted (in Escales, 2026). Similarly, Payne characterises these movements as old wine in new bottles: forces that prioritise order and stability, even at the cost of violence and exclusion, over the rights of those deemed unworthy of protection (in Gartenlaub-González, 2024). Historically vulnerable populations or “lives that do not matter” bear the brunt of these new modes of governance: women, LGBTIQ+ people, migrants and racialised communities, and victims of genocide, illegal occupation, and forced displacement.

This phenomenon also has a transnational dimension. Research such as The Spanish far right on the global stage(Corrêa & Elman, 2025; Barrientos D. & Ojeda, 2025) shows how Spain functions as a node for the ideological production and export of far-right discourse, tactics, and funding to Latin America, Europe, and Africa, via actors like Opus Dei, Vox and its Disenso Foundation, Hazte Oír, CitizenGO, and the Political Network for Values. These networks fuse religion, money, and political manipulation, coordinating media campaigns, strategic litigation, and emotionally charged narratives around “child protection,” “parental freedom,” “protecting women and girls,” and national sovereignty against “globalism” and the threat of “wokism.” The anti-gender offensive, in this light, targets not only women and LGBTIQ+ people, but democracy itself.

In this context, the present call seeks to critically discuss the discursive and material borders that characterise contemporary authoritarian politics. The dossier is titled: Far Right, Authoritarianisms, Populisms? Naming the Fascist Moment of Contemporary Politics.

Possible lines of inquiry include:

• Fascism, neofascism, far right, populism: conceptual debates, geopolitics, and historical genealogies of the contemporary radical right.
• Continuities and ruptures: what these movements share with, and how they differ from, historical fascisms and twentieth-century dictatorships.
• Typologies of reactionary mobilisation.
• The epistemic dispute over rights, science, and knowledge: attacks on knowledge production (e.g., defunding, epistemicide, targeting of specific disciplinary fields) and on rights-protection infrastructure, locally and internationally.
• Transnationalisation of the far right: funding ecosystem, digital platforms, and the global circulation of discourses and tactics.
• Femonationalism, homonationalism, and reactionary politics: the weaponisation of gender, race and sexuality, and the securitisation of politics.
• Anti-gender and anti-trans politics: political diagonalism, disarticulation and the dismantling of intersectional solidarities.
• Natalism, childhoods, and “the family” as political-moral cores of contemporary authoritarianism.
• Religious alliances, realignments, and fragmentations: Catholics, evangelicals, and Pentecostals confronting sexual and reproductive rights.
• Transitional justice, memory, genocide, and denialism.
• Feminisms and LGBTIQ+ movements confronting rising fascisms and authoritarianisms: coalition politics and strategies of resistance.
• Platformisation of politics: digital violence, disinformation, and hate speech.
• Constitutional processes, moral panic, and the paradoxes of defending rights.
• Authoritarian constitutionalism and disputes over the interpretation of rights.
• How should we study the contemporary far right and authoritarianisms? Methodological, ethical, and care-related challenges.

Accepted languages: Spanish, English, and Portuguese
Call opens: July 24, 2026
Call closes: November 5, 2026
Publication date: June 30, 2027

The editorial guidelines for authors can be found on Pléyade’s website, and article proposals should be submitted through the platform at the following link: https://www.revistapleyade.cl/index.php/OJS/about/submissions

Guest editors

Lieta Vivaldi, Universidad Alberto Hurtado (UAH). Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, and director of the Programa Derecho y Cuidados (Law and Care Programme). PhD in Sociology (Goldsmiths), MSc in Sociology (London School of Economics and Political Science), and lawyer (Universidad de Chile). Researches sexual and reproductive rights, critical theory, ethics, feminisms, care, and far-right authoritarian movements. Member of IIPSS, ABOFEM, and GEDIS. lvivaldi@uahurtado.cl

Jaime Barrientos, Universidad Alberto Hurtado (UAH). Full Professor, Faculty of Psychology, director of the Research Program on Gender and Diversity (GEDIS). Researcher on sexual prejudice and its effects on the quality of life of LGBTQ+ people, and currently on anti-gender actions and mobilisations and their effects on the lives of LGBTQ+ people. jbarrientos@uahurtado.cl

Tomás Ojeda, Université de Lausanne (UNIL). Postdoctoral researcher at UNIL’s Institute of Social Sciences and Centre for Gender Studies. PhD in Gender Studies (London School of Economics and Political Science) and Master’s in Clinical Psychology from the Universidad de Chile. Researches the politics of evidence and epistemic disputes in debates on gender-affirming care and LGBTIQ+ conversion practices, as well as the transnational circulation of “anti-gender ideology” and anti-trans clinical activism. tomas.ojeda@unil.ch 

References

Barrientos D., J., & Ojeda, T. (2025). De Pinochet a Kast: Conexiones españolas en la ultraderecha chilena. In S. Corrêa & J. Elman (Eds), De España al mundo: La proyección global de la ultraderecha española contra los derechos sexuales y reproductivos. Los casos de Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile y Kenia (pp. 60–78). L’Associació de Drets Sexuals i Reproductius. https://lassociacio.org/wp-content/uploads/De-Espana-al-mundo.pdf

Calderaro, C. (2025). Beyond Instrumentalization: Far-Right Women’s Appropriation of Feminism in France. Politics & Gender, 21(4), 931–959. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X25000030

Corrêa, S., & Elman, J. (Eds). (2025). De España al mundo: La proyección global de la ultraderecha española contra los derechos sexuales y reproductivos. Los casos de Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile y Kenia. L’Associació de Drets Sexuals i Reproductius. https://lassociacio.org/wp-content/uploads/De-Espana-al-mundo.pdf

Corrêa, S., Paternotte, D., & House, C. (2023). Dr Frankenstein’s hydra: Contours, meanings and effects of anti-gender politics. In P. Aggleton, R. Cover, C. H. Logie, C. E. Newman, & R. Parker (Eds), Routledge Handbook of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Rights (2nd edn). Routledge.

Escales, V. (2026, june 9). Sonia Corrêa: "No son antiderechos: disputan la definición misma de los derechos" (Interview). LatFem. https://latfem.org/sonia-correa-no-son-antiderechos-disputan-la-definicion-misma-de-los-derechos/

Gartenlaub-González, A. (2024). Interview with Leigh A. Payne: "Los discursos de los grupos de derechas radicales son como el vino viejo en botellas nuevas, priorizan el orden y la estabilidad, aunque impliquen violencia y exclusión". Disjuntiva. Crítica de les Ciències Socials, 5(2), 129–135. https://doi.org/10.14198/DISJUNTIVA2024.5.2.9

Payne, L.A., Zulver, J., & Escoffier, S. (Eds.). (2023). The Right Against Rights in Latin America. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

Sabsay, L. (2026). The political aesthetics of cruelty: Contemporary authoritarian politics and the struggle between sovereignty and relationality. Contemporary Political Theory, 25(1), 33. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-026-00812-0

Tudor, A. (2026). Right-Wing Times: Fascism, Left/Right Convergences, and the                         Relationship of “Gender-Critical” to Anti-Gender. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 51(3), 621–647. https://doi.org/10.1086/738994

Tudor, A., & Ticktin, M. (2021). Sexuality and borders in right wing times: A conversation. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(9), 1648–1667. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2021.1909743

Vivaldi, L. (2024). Anti-Gender Campaigns and Abortion: Feminist Strategies Against Reactionary Biopolitics in Chile. In A. Holvikivi, B. Holzberg, & T. Ojeda (Eds), Transnational Anti-Gender Politics: Feminist Solidarity in Times of Global Attacks (pp. 161–180). Palgrave.