Can collective democratic protest and rightwing authoritarianism and populism be distinguished as interdependent movements of political emergence, i.e. movements emerging outside democratic institutions and portending profound reorganizations of political order, but not yet fully recognizable as political entities as they own weak political representation? This essay argues that contemporary social sciences are often unable to comprehend or register political emergence, whereas, by contrast, contemporary art, art activism, literature and film – from the postcolonial novel and arts biennales to banlieue rap music and street actions for refugees – have in recent years produced profound insights into the nature of collective mobilizations and protests of all kinds. We thus observe that there exist parallel paths for intellectual inquiry into the same urgent issues of collective protest and populism. But we also observe a lack of methodological rapport and dialogue. Against this background, I argue that we stand to gain from an effort to study collective democratic protest and populist authoritarianism as converging issues with far-reaching implications for democratic society, and that we undertake such research by conjoining social scientific research and aesthetic analysis. To substantiate this claim, the essay turns to two cases of political emergence from the 1930s, in which we find mirrored our current condition, as well as the contrast between populist aesthetics and democratic aesthetics. 

Det är ett nytt EU som träder fram. En kommissionär har ansvar för att skydda den “europeiska livsstilen”. EU:s utrikesrepresentant talar om resten av världen som en “djungel” som vi måste skyddas från. Samtidigt liknar EU mer och mer en lydstat till USA. Stefan Jonsson undersöker vad som pågår vid Europas gränser.

Rarely tolerating political and geographical borders, literature and the arts pushes against borders and boundaries and discloses a secret about democracy. During the ICORN Network Meeting in Brussels in March 2023, Stefan Jonsson, professor at Linköping University, spoke about how the aesthetic imagination is a force indispensable to democratic societies and how borders can be crossed through it. Read his speech here.

Prefatory article that introduces the themes, topics and articles of this special issue on the images of protest.

This essay analyzes how artworks express the Ukrainian revolution 2013–2014 as an experience of democracy. Three questions are foregrounded. How do aesthetic expressions capture and accumulate social energy? How do they help convert such energy into political action? How do they preserve it, for future use? These questions concern the ways in which aesthetic works express what I call political emergence: people who have no say in political institutions come together as a collective that changes the political order. Analyzing selected examples from the Maidan uprising, the essay demonstrates a contradiction between how democratic protests generate aesthetic forms with a strong universal and utopian thrust and how these democratic utopias are subsequently contained by cultural representations and political traditions, in Ukraine’s case a particular form of militant and self-sacrificing nationalism, which, however, cannot do without projections of utopian solidarity.

The Aesthetics of Protest on Kyiv’s Maidan: Reflections on Political Emergence and the Twenty-First Century Crowd Abstract This essay argues that aesthetic works offer an understanding of the performativity of democratic protests and crowd action. To substantiate the argument, it analyzes a handful of artworks from the Ukrainian Revolution 2013–2014: posters by Strayk-Plakat, films by Babylon 13, Matviy Vaisberg's The Wall, and the aesthetic symbolism of the so-called Heavenly Hundred. More generally, the article demonstrates how aesthetic works express what may be termed political emergence: people who have no say in political institutions come together as a collective that changes the political order. Aesthetics works enable an understanding of political emergence that is mostly unavailable to the social sciences, history, and journalism. For these reasons, the article contends, analysis of crowd action and twenty-first collective protest in particular would gain from theoretical and methodological efforts to conjoin social research and aesthetic analysis.

Revolutioner, opstande og protester er i høj grad et spørgsmål om billeder. Mens de finder sted, fungerer bestemte billeder, emblemer eller symboler som mobiliserende faktorer og giver konflikten form, tegner forbindelseslinjer til tidligere kampe eller billedliggør det, der kæmpes imod eller for. Når de revolutionære tilstande er ovre, lever begivenhederne videre som ikoniske billeder, der fortætter de komplekse og uoverskuelige hændelsesforløb i enkle, genkendelige repræsentationer, der både dækker over modsætninger og opsamler ny energi, så kampen mod overmagten kan genoptages på et senere tidspunkt.

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