Social scientists failed to predict the conservative turn which culminated in Brazil with the election in 2018 of a far-right president and several extreme right governors and parliamentarians. Different factors explain the analytical blindness to the conservative counterattack. First of all, the hyper-specialization in disciplinary subfields has created obstacle for grasping multicausal and socially multisituated transformations as in the case of the conservative moves in different countries. There has been also a lack of methods able to follow politics within both virtual burbles and everyday interactions. Additionally, insufficient attention to similar movements in different world regions has obfuscated common developments as well as right-wing transnational alliances. Finally, a deeper oligarchization of political systems runs apace across the world and has had contradictory relations with the emergence of the far-right, stimulating as well as reinforcing it. This nexus has been also overlooked by social scientists.

In the face of these limitations, we decidedly want to discuss the Brazilian case in this workshop from an interdisciplinary, encompassing and comparative perspective. For this endeavor, we have invited experts who have been dedicated to the study of the Brazilian case as well as colleagues who have leant on similar developments in different parts of the world. All in all, we aim at constructing both a broader diagnosis of the conservative backlash as observed in different countries and a common research agenda for further analyzing the development and also the political debilities of contemporary far right-wing actors.

The international Symposium takes place in the framework of the Anneliese Maier Research Prize awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to the Brazilian sociologist José Maurício Domingues and is co-organized by the NETSAL/IESP/State University of Rio de Janeiro, the Institute for Latin American Studies of FU Berlin, the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and Mecila, Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America.

Program [pdf]