Notes from dMSA Roundtable
Chaired and summarized for the blog post by Laura Mafizzoli
On June 4, 2026, MEMPOP team members participated in the roundtable titled Memory and Populism in Borderland Regions in Eastern and Central Europe, organised and moderated by fellow team member Laura Mafizzoli. Building on earlier conversations initiated during the MEMPOP roundtable Popularizing Remembrance: Populism, Pop Culture and Memory Politics at the Memory Studies Association Conference 2025 in Prague, the roundtable focused on memory and populism in the borderland regions where the MEMPOP team members operate.
The discussion examined how populist sentiments, political imaginaries, and forms of belonging are shaped through everyday mnemonic practices in historically complex borderland regions. Conceptually, the roundtable asked whether populism can also be understood from below as a vernacular form of belonging and critique, challenging the prevailing view of populism in political science and other disciplines as a purely pathological or anti-democratic force (a framing in line with the recent special issue “Populism: Anthropological Approaches” in Current Anthropology). By bringing together case studies from different European borderland regions, the session proposed a transnational and processual understanding of populism as it unfolds across time, space and experiences of state violence. The roundtable also aimed to consolidate an emerging working group on “Memory and Populism”, envisioned as a collaborative platform for sustained exchange, joint publications and future comparative research beyond the limits of individual projects. If anyone reading this blog post is interested in joining the working group, please write to: mempop@eu.cas.cz
Populism in the field
The discussion began with each participant introducing their field sites and reflecting on how populism emerges in their ethnographic research.
Johana Wyss’ research is situated in Opava in Czech Silesia, close to the Czech-Polish border. She is MEMPOP’s Principal Investigator, and her interest in exploring the connection between memory and populism from below began in November 2019, when she conducted a bottom-up ethnographic pilot study on why so many Opavians supported illiberal populist parties, even though thirty years earlier many had been fighting for liberal democracy. This led her to realise that people’s antagonistic memories (the kind political parties can and do mobilise) extend much further into the past than the post-socialist period alone, through older post-imperial histories, particularly the reconfiguration of state borders and the forced displacements and resettlements that followed. She points to memories of the Treaty of Trianon, the Sudeten German expulsions and other contested historical episodes, which led her to expand her research beyond Silesia to other post-imperial borderlands, including Burgenland, Istria, Galicia and Bukovina (the regions MEMPOP is working on).
Johana emphasises the importance of a bottom-up, ethnographic approach that investigates the everyday mnemonic practices and populist sentiments of ordinary people living in these border regions. Returning repeatedly to annual commemorations in Silesia, she observed a persistent sense of mnemonic exclusion among local inhabitants (a feeling that their memories and understandings of the past are not reflected in official narratives) alongside a growing demand for mnemonic inclusion, with parties such as ANO, led by Andrej Babiš, appearing more responsive to these demands than traditional parties. This led her to develop the concept of mnemonic inclusion in populism: this perspective highlights how populist actors seek to incorporate memories, historical experiences, and identities that many feel have been overlooked, marginalised, or excluded from the dominant public narrative.
Diána Vonnák works in Ukraine, in the region of Galicia (or Halychyna). Her case study differs from the others in two ways: Ukraine lacks a single, easily identifiable populist party around which discourses of populism might be centred, with populism instead running through the nearly all the major political formations. Additionally, because the country is at war, its electoral politics are suspended, thus changing the way politics is done. Her focus is on heritage and memory work concerning traumatic pasts (Soviet-era repressions, the Holocaust, and the contested legacy of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) each subject to competing projects of inclusion, from a liberal, multiethnic memory agendas to the state’s growing regulation of Soviet-era remembrance since the war in Donbas. For Diána, populism becomes something of a chimaera: pervasive in every context she examines, yet never quite taking the shape of party-political mobilisation or a conventional left-right divide. She argued this is productive, since it reveals what wartime rearrangements and the recasting of citizenship mean for popular sovereignty and belonging. She suggested that Ukraine’s mass mobilisations are rarely studied in relation to populism, which is often framed as counter-hegemonic even as it sometimes consolidates into successful governing regimes. She emphasised the enduring importance of the discursive trope pitting “the people” against elites or the state, noting that even in wartime, the entire nation can be cast as separate from its elites once they are perceived as corrupt; even when that same statehood underpins successful resistance to Russian aggression.
Franz Graf does research in the Seewinkel in Burgenland, located on Austria’s border with Hungary and formerly part of Western Hungary until the Treaty of Trianon. Working with farmers, conservationists, tourism actors, and technicians, Franz examines water as a socially, politically, and economically central figure in a region increasingly shaped by the climate crisis and ecological uncertainty. Through water, what emerges is not one singular form of populism but multiple situated populist articulations around land use, water governance, and political recognition. Different actors invoke “the people” for competing political projects. Agrarian populism is among the most visible forms: farmers and smallholders frequently speak from the position of “ordinary people” governed by distant actors such as the European Union, the state, NGOs, experts, and the media. At the same time, Franz pointed to the importance of anti-populism. Water managers, scientists, and technical experts often deploy the label “populist” dismissively to frame local resistance as irrational, emotional, or anti-scientific. In this sense, populism is a category of governance used to delegitimise dissent. These tensions are embedded in what Franz described as a form of governing populism. In Burgenland, long-term Social Democratic rule combines welfare-oriented politics with authoritarian tendencies, anti-migration rhetoric, and a highly personalised style of leadership. At the same time, anger against provincial governance is frequently channelled by the Freedom Party, Austria’s far-right populist party, through an antagonism between “the local population” and the “Social Democratic system.”
Astrea Nikolovska’s research is situated in Serbia and examines the afterlives of the Yugoslav wars, especially unresolved questions of victimhood, responsibility, and sovereignty. Her main field site is the memory landscape surrounding the 1999 NATO bombing. Astrea emphasized that populism here emerges as an affective and moral language through which people make sense of exclusion, humiliation, abandonment, and historical injury. Her work on depleted uranium illustrates this especially clearly. Scientific uncertainty surrounding cancer, toxicity, and long-term harm becomes politically productive precisely because the damage is difficult to conclusively prove or dismiss. Multiple claims gather around this uncertainty: claims about bodily suffering, NATO violence, state abandonment, and the unequal value of lives in the international order. Populism emerges from moral certainty: when proof remains indeterminate, the affective conclusion becomes powerful: “we were harmed, and nobody cares”.
Beyond populism “from above” and “from below”: an ethnographic approach to populism
Laura then asked a methodological question: rather than studying populism only through moments of populist rule, could it be approached diachronically, as a longer process, and how might ethnographic research complicate the distinction between populism “from below” and populism “from above”?
Johana argued strongly that bottom-up approaches remain underexplored in populism research. Existing scholarship tends to focus heavily on political elites, parties, and national political discourse. She emphasized the importance of studying populism from below by focusing on the “demand side”: the everyday experiences, grievances, and forms of political frustration that make populist politics resonate. Ethnographic research is particularly important here because it helps us understand how populist sentiments emerge in everyday life rather than only through formal political institutions or elite political actors.
Diána agreed with Johana’s point about imbalance, but raised a further question: is the bottom-up perspective simply inherent to the ethnographic method regardless of subject, or does it require deliberately looking elsewhere, for instance, away from the canon, away from state-sanctioned ways of remembering? In her own research, she works with regional and local activists, civil society members, state officials, and museum professionals, people through whom larger agendas (European-funded or Ukrainian state agendas) are realized. Yet, they also act in ways that have little to do with the national picture. That is why MEMPOP’s focus on borderland regions, rather than nation-states, is helpful here. Finally, the biggest advantage of the bottom-up approach for her has been shifting away from discourse into political economy, allowing her to think about populism beyond rhetoric.
Rather than reducing populism to either above or below, for Franz, what matters is how these categories are deployed by the people being studied. In his fieldwork on water conflicts, he said he has not found a single interlocutor who does not claim both to speak “for the people” and to understand the current crisis “from below”. What complicates this is that many of his interlocutors share an experience of not mattering, of not being heard: a grievance that populist mobilisation can easily take up, though it does not necessarily begin with right-wing populist politics. He traced these grievances to how governance is practised by the provincial state, presented as a neutral, technical procedure based on monitoring and expert knowledge, claiming to “bring all interests under one roof,” while the organisation of interests and who profits remain largely hidden. However, his ethnography shows an extremely heterogeneous field: smallholders next to landowners with tens of thousands of hectares, sometimes represented as a single group despite radically different interests and power. For Franz, this shifts the question from above-versus-below to how grievances travel, who translates them into political problems, and who gains authority to define what the conflict is about.
Astrea did not have much to add methodologically. She turned instead to a related question she often encounters at conferences, namely, how populism differs from nationalism. A question that usually has no clear answer, given how many definitions exist for both terms, and one that tends to lead to unproductive discussion. The ethnographic approach allows her to work between nationalism and populism without defining either. In Serbia, where politics and memory are deeply shaped by nationalism, asking people specifically about populism (about who belongs to “the people” versus “the elites”) surfaces a different picture than questions about nationalism do: issues of betrayal, uncertainty, and trust that are more visible in discussions of populism specifically.
Relations between Memory and Populism
Laura then asked whether attention to forgotten, marginalised, or reclaimed memories in borderland regions complicates the tendency to view populist memory politics as purely exclusionary or inclusionary.
Johana answered using the example of commemorations of the Velvet Revolution in Opava, Silesia. She described official commemorations in the Czech Republic as exclusionary, privileging the role of intellectual elites, many of whom, like Václav Havel, later became politicians and remain internationally well known, especially during November celebrations. These same commemorations tend to underplay the role of factory workers, environmental activists, and women who were also central to the events of 1989, leaving many groups excluded and forgotten from the annual commemorations. She noted that it is usually politicians from ANO, the Czech Republic’s main populist party, who challenge these dominant narratives, drawing attention to those left out of the official story and presenting themselves as the voice of ordinary people whose contributions have gone unrecognised. This dynamic, therefore, complicates the conventional dichotomy between “divisive populists” and “inclusive liberal democrats.”
Diána shared an example from a visit to the Territory of Terror museum in Lviv, which documents the memory of totalitarian regimes and holds a large collection of oral history testimonies, including from people deported to Siberia after the Second World War. A traveling exhibition there included a map of Europe where visitors could mark flags for family members from different places; she noted only one or two flags for Russia and Belarus, despite the fact that Lviv’s post-war population (following the near-total killing and deportation of its pre-war Jewish and Polish population in the Holocaust) was resettled not only by Ukrainians, but also many people from Russia, Belarus, and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. This points to many mixed families in the region. In her conversations with her interlocutors, she did not sense these connections were being hidden. People just spoke of them differently, especially the often fraught connections to Russian relatives during the full-scale war. She then gave the example of the current upsurge in Ukraine of documentation, memorial initiatives, testimony-giving, and archival research into family histories, which function as avenues for inclusion into the political nation during a time of crisis while also producing new forms of discomfort and new silences, and a kind of marginalisation of these entanglements, given the ongoing war.
Franz described mnemonic practices in Burgenland as affective and political sediments closely tied to the landscape. He pointed to memories of poverty, preserved in displays in local inns, barns, and small museums and narrated with pride, alongside a certain romanticisation of self-sufficient hardship. This memory of poverty fits the official narrative of Burgenland as a poor Hungarian borderland transformed into “real Austria” through the work of its inhabitants. Alongside this, he described the continued visibility of aristocratic heritage (castles, estates, and objects of cultural prestige tied to the Esterházy lordship, Austria’s largest private landowner), which romanticises aristocratic rule, while stories of smallholders, landless labourers, Roma communities, and wetland inhabitants are marginalised. The coexistence of poverty and feudal memory is therefore ethnographically significant. Land distribution remained a contentious political issue into the 1970s, after which focus shifted to extended landscape exploitation (drainage infrastructure and land improvement expanding agricultural production), with some residents’ memories of social advancement tied to the conversion of peatland into farmland. Present-day grievances of “not mattering” are tied to these memories of poverty and dependency, while the lordship is remembered as a continuing beneficiary of landscape transformation. Hence, reading contemporary agriculture only through the lens of environmental destruction risks negating the social mobility that occurred despite unequal power structures, and that marginalised memories can fuel resentment through simplified antagonism, but can also articulate more precise critiques of entrenched inequality.
Astrea connected the question to the earlier discussion, noting that populist politics everywhere are often based on reinterpretations or reclaiming of alternative histories, which emerge through a circulation of emotions, affects, ideas, and experiences moving between “above” and “below.” This alternative dimension is especially visible in her own research on transitional justice, where she draws on a Laclauian understanding of populism as anti-hegemonic. She described transitional justice as a hegemonic process that prescribes categories of victimhood, perpetration, guilt, and responsibility, categories that certain groups do not fit into, whether intentionally or unintentionally excluded. Tracing these processes shows how hegemony operates and how populism can emerge as a force opposed to it.
“The people” versus “The elite”: how to account for forms of power and sovereignty that do not fit neatly into this framework?
For Johana, the distinction between people and elites remains a useful one for her research, grounded in the power structures visible in her data. She described it as representing two ends of a spectrum, with ethnographic research well suited to exploring the many positions in between, such as local elites, community leaders, activists, public intellectuals, and municipal politicians who may be privileged in one context and marginalised in another. Ethnography helps capture these ambiguous, shifting positions which are relational and situational.
Diána noted that terms like “people” and “elite” function both as part of an explanatory framework and as rhetorical tools within the contexts being studied. The more useful anthropological move is to ask what can be done with the distinction, and who deploys it, since this reveals something about social stratification, moral hierarchies, and hegemony. In fact, the same trope (the “people” versus “elite” opposition) takes on entirely different meanings depending on who uses it, contrasting the populist party’s elite use of the term with workers and their descendants. This proximity between one’s own explanatory language and the social reality being studied can feel disorienting. Yet, maintaining these power distinctions matters, and it would be methodologically and morally wrong to relativise them.
Franz agreed, adding that there is a risk in producing fixed analytical groups. Yet, thinking through these dichotomies can help locate where power operates, cautioning against assuming that “the elite” is always visible, since power is distributed and layered through ownership, expertise, and legal procedure. For instance, in his fieldwork, he traces who controls water infrastructure and dams, who manages long-term contracts with the National Park, and who sits in the Chamber of Agriculture. This allows him to note that while the Esterházy complex is a crucial actor in his research context, its power cannot function without numerous other associations and institutions carrying it forward across different levels. For him, making sense of the people/elite binary means tracing how popular sovereignty and authority are exercised through local political practice.
Astrea said that populism becoming “real politics” creates a paradox: those who govern by populist means themselves become elites, and much populist speech, in practice, comes from people belonging to different types of elites. In the case of her research on depleted uranium in Serbia, doctors and politicians (themselves elite actors) position themselves as people harmed by radiation from NATO, in what she described as an entirely elite-driven narrative framed in the language of victimhood. Hence, neither “people” nor “elite” is a monolithic category but rather plural categories, with many actors continually redefining one another. In this sense, tracing who claims to belong to which category, and how, is itself an ethnographic question rather than one that requires researchers to impose a fixed definition. This approach, instead, shows how these categories are constructed within specific contexts, though she acknowledged the ongoing risk of essentialism that anthropological reflexivity seeks to guard against.
Towards a Conclusion: Future and Populism
Johana is attentive to temporality methodologically, to orient herself among political parties and their narratives in ways that can differ from political science framings. She pointed to the Czech Motorists party, often labelled as populist far-right, noting she struggles to categorise them as populist in an anthropological sense since they offer a clear, if largely negative, vision of the future, warning that things will worsen unless they gain power and are able to “stop Brussels” and preserve diesel cars. She contrasted this with parties like ANO, which say little about the future and focus instead on the present or the past. She suggested that a crisis of the future is driving much contemporary politics, not only in the Czech Republic but across Europe and beyond.
Diána described war as shaping the future in a specific way, noting a recurring desire among her interlocutors in Ukraine to arrive at a “new Ukraine,” a clean slate: a sentiment familiar across post-transition societies, drawing a parallel to her native Hungary’s post-1989 fixation on “catching up with Austria.” In Ukraine, there is little promise of a straightforwardly optimistic future, but rather an ongoing securitisation of the future, with a fatalistic sense that Russia is not going anywhere and that a state of perpetual armed readiness must be accepted. Alongside this, she noted a persistent, almost eschatological discourse of eventually arriving at a Ukraine fully ready to belong. One that is difficult to disentangle from an exclusionary populist agenda that marginalises citizens who do not fit a militarised standard of good citizenship, in tension with civic equality.
Franz gave the example of how a severe drought at Lake Neusiedl, occurring alongside proposals by the Esterházy foundations (which own roughly 75 per cent of the lake) to replenish it, raised questions about the entanglement of the climate crisis and vested interests. He described a mockumentary imagining Burgenland without the lake, generated using AI, which caused public alarm and cancelled tourist bookings despite periodic drying being a natural feature of the steppe lake ecosystem. Current crises thus can be read through the diverse futures people fear or hope for, depending on whether they are irrigation farmers, part of the tourism economy, or conservationists. Yet, unlike other populist trends elsewhere in Austria, this context involves little appeal to “going back,” with memories of a poorer past shaping people’s positions but the future remaining central to what people imagine and want. Power remains a key question: who has a say in what measures are taken, and who can shape the future and profit from landscape transformation, given that climate change will keep intensifying regional extremes.
Astrea explained the tension between the ruling Serbian Progressive Party’s rhetoric and lived experiences. This rhetoric frames the future as bright, full of progress and development. She illustrated this tension with an anecdote about an elderly man. He praised the President effusively. At the same time, he described his own living conditions as the worst of his life. This illustrates how, from the “demand side,” future-oriented rhetoric can be politically productive. It can be politically productive without translating into actual well-being. She contrasted this with another conceptualisation of the future in Serbia, built around confirming the past. Namely, depleted uranium will expose Serbs to radiation for four million years: a timeframe that carries no real geological meaning for a nation, but functions instead to reaffirm a narrative of victimhood. She noted broader debates about a contemporary crisis of imagination regarding the future, but argued that ethnographic tracing reveals the future to be plural rather than a single monolithic idea of technocratic progress.