On November 19th, 2025, the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies and the Institute of European Studies welcomed visiting scholars Amy Skonieczny, Professor of International Relations at San Francisco State University and Valentina Nava, a PhD candidate for Political Sociology at Université Paris Cité, to give presentations on populism and the far right. Moderated by Right-Wing Studies Department Chair, Lawrence Rosenthal, this event was held both on Zoom and in person at the Banksway Building with 50 total attendees.
Amy Skonieczny presented her ongoing research in a lecture entitled, “Does Populism Have a Global Vision? Right-Wing Populism and the Reimagining of Global Governance.” Sckonieczny’s presentation argues that populists are not just disrupting global governance but actively reshaping it. Although rooted in a largely localized “people vs. elite” worldview, populism is inherently global, spreading across borders as leaders borrow each other’s rhetoric, tactics, and institutional strategies. When populists engage global governance, they challenge the liberal model built on rules-based cooperation, norm diffusion, and cosmopolitan moral commitments. Instead, they promote a rival system defined by transactional engagement with institutions, selective compliance with norms, and a “bounded cosmopolitanism” that prioritizes the moral worth of “our people” over universal obligations. This moral reframing reshapes global governance in areas like gender and family policy, migration, and education seen in actions such as Hungary’s “Christian Europe,” U.S. withdrawals from international agreements, and Poland’s restrictions on LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. Ultimately, Skonieczny argues that populists are not anti–global governance but are constructing an alternative order with new values, rules, and narratives that international relations scholars must take seriously as a thick, emerging model of global governance.
Shortly after Valentina Nava gave a presentation on her PhD dissertation focusing on economic crisis and far-right voting in rural working-class Italy. This talk traced how a historically left-leaning, antifascist mountain community in northern Italy has undergone a sharp rightward turn. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in a rural area of Emilia-Romagna, including daily immersion, parish and associational life, archival work, and over a hundred interviews, it shows how socioeconomic decline, deindustrialization, and the erosion of local solidarities have reorganized everyday moral judgments of worth and belonging. As material insecurity deepens and neoliberal logics shape perceptions of deservingness, residents increasingly sort insiders from outsiders, often framing elites and urban centers as adversaries. With unions and political infrastructures weakened, far-right narratives gain traction, especially Fratelli d’Italia’s promise to prioritize hard-working Italians and put the Italian people first. Former communist voters describe this shift not as ideological conversion but as a defensive response to downward mobility: the left is perceived as abandoning workers’ interests, while the right is seen, however imperfectly, as guarding scarce resources against immigrants and elites. Situated within a broader Italian and global context of financial crises, austerity, and rising inequalities, these findings illuminate how class, race, and gender refract through contemporary far-right populism and how communities experiencing decline come to embrace punitive, exclusionary political imaginaries. The hour-and-a-half long event was followed by a thoughtful and rich discussion with the presenters and a light reception.