Art and Resistance: An Interview with Börries Nehe and Aurel Eschmann

How do we find images and develop counter-strategies that embolden others and create a narrative for global struggles today?

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Illustration: www.zersetzer.com

Börries Nehe

Börries Nehe holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with a specialization in Sociology. He is currently the academic coordinator of the International Research Group on Authoritarianism & Counter-Strategies

The Alt-Right in Latin America

Following the collapse of left-wing populist movements in Latin America, neoliberal and authoritarian governments have spread all over the region. Clear examples of this resurgence are Bolsonaro in Brazil, Lenin Moreno in Ecuador, and Mauricio Macri in Argentina, not to mention the authoritarian drift of Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela. This authoritarian turn at the institutional-political level has been accompanied by ideological changes in public and ‘non-public’ opinion: hate speech, anti-egalitarian discourses, authoritarian values, and an individualistic common sense. Of course, these discourses existed in the past too, but their virulence and the new constellations in which they are inscribed represent an ideological novelty in the Latin American political landscape.

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Javier Villamor, Nicolás Márquez & Agustín Laje at a conference organized by the far-right, ultra-catholic Spanish group "HazteOir". Picture by https://www.flickr.com/photos/hazteoir/

Gustavo Robles

Gustavo Robles studied contemporary history and philosophy, an area in which he received his Ph.D. degree. He has been an Associated Professor at the Department of Education at the National University of La Plata (UNLP), a Postdoc-Researcher at the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (UNLP-CONICET, Argentina), and an Invited Lecturer at different Argentinian Universities. He also carried out doctoral and postdoctoral research stays at different German universities, such as the University of Frankfurt, the University of Jena, and the Humboldt University of Berlin. His areas of research interests are Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, contemporary political thought, and social philosophy, and his current project is focused on the connections between subjectivization processes and affective dimensions in current authoritarian neoliberalism. Furthermore, he is an activist in different political and cultural collectives in Argentina and Germany related to issues such as human rights and immigrant working conditions.

Last publications:
"Crisis de la experiencia y (pos)fascismos. Lecturas desde la Teoría Crítica". Constelaciones. Revista de Teoría Crítica. N° 13. 312-339. 2021

"La teoría del reconocimiento de Axel Honneth. Análisis crítico". In Comou, Antonio (ed.). Perspectivas en Teoría Social Contemporánea. La Plata: EDULP. 2021

"El fin de algunas ilusiones. Subjetividad y democracia en tiempos de regresión autoritaria". Resistencias. Revista de Filosofía de la Historia. 2(1). 14-27- 2020

"Sobre la dimensión política del resentimiento" (2020). Castalia. Revista de Psicología. 34. 5-23

Latin American Neoconservatisms and Antifeminism: Freedom, Family, and Life

In Latin America, the re-neoliberalization of political and economic systems has intensified an ongoing process of de-democratization, strengthening the onslaught by neoconservative religious and secular groups, which have been growing more powerful since around 2013. These two processes—re-neoliberalization and the growth of neoconservatisms—are connected.

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Ailynn Torres

Ailynn Torres Santana is a postdoctoral researcher at the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC) of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (2019-2022), a visiting researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin (2021), an associate researcher at FLACSO Ecuador (2019-2022), and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University – Chicago (fall 2021). She has been an associate professor at Universidad de la Habana (2006-2012) and visiting professor at Freie Universität Berlin (2021), FLACSO Ecuador (2016-2018, 2020-2022), Universidad de Barcelona (2015, 2018, 2022), and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2018). In 2019 she was a visiting researcher at Harvard University. Her research interests include feminist movements, inequality, and citizenship in Latin America. She is editor of the books "Derechos en riesgo en América Latina: 11 estudios sobre grupos neoconservadores" (Quito/ Bogotá: Fundación Rosa Luxemburgo/Desde Abajo, 2020) and "Los Cuidados: del centro de la vida al centro de la política" (Santiago: FES-ILDIS, 2021). She has written lots of academic papers about gender inequalities and feminist politics in Latin America and Cuba. She has a column on OnCuba News and has collaborated with a lot of press platforms such as Jacobin-Lat, NACLA, and Sidecar-New Left Review. She is a member of the editorial boards of Cuban Studies (Harvard University) and Sin Permiso (Barcelona).

What does authoritarianism mean in times of coronavirus?

In late April, the International Foundation for Freedom, headed by Peruvian Literature Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, issued a statement warning against the rise of authoritarianism in Latin America due to the coronavirus pandemic. Among the signatories were well-known defenders of neoliberal ideas in Latin America and Spain, such as Vargas Llosa himself and the former presidents Mauricio Macri (Argentina), José María Aznar (Spain), and Alvaro Uribe (Colombia). The statement expressed concern “about the measures taken in some countries that have indefinitely restricted basic freedoms and rights” in the name of the combatting the virus.

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Gustavo Robles

The Platform Capitalist Pandemic. An introductory inquiry into the Brazilian neoliberal management of uberization during the COVID-19 lockdown

For the past few years, platform capitalist companies such as Rappi, Uber, 99taxi, Loggi, Ifood, and James have been gradually infecting Brazil’s largest cities. By connecting consumers, workers, and products through digital apps, these companies have been responsible for further entrenching the Brazilian neoliberal restructuring of labour that has been going on since the 1990s.

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Fábio Luís Ferreira Nóbrega Franco

Fábio Luís Ferreira Nóbrega Franco is a psychoanalyst and holds a PhD in philosophy. Since 2006 he has been a member of an interdisciplinary group, the Social Theory, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis Laboratory (LATESFIP)