Recent years have seen a disturbing advance in populist and authoritarian styles of rule and, in response, a rise in popular activism. Strongmen, especially since the advent of fascism, have formed their base of power in popular acclaim. But what power do the people have in checking the rise of tyranny? In this book an international team of experts representing several academic disciplines examines the power relationship between peoples and their rulers. It is among the first to study this globally as a problem of nation states. From populism in 19th-century Latin America to eastern Europe since the collapse of communism, to the Arab Spring and contemporary Russia and China, the cases in this book span five continents and twelve nations. Taken together, they reveal how different forms of popular opposition have succeeded or failed in unseating authoritarian regimes and expose the tactics and strategies used by regimes to repress people power and create an image of popular support. Analysing the causes and consequence of the global advance of authoritarianism, The Power of Populism and the People offers a historical comparison of popular protest, opposition and crises over the last century to the recent rise of populist leaders.

Revealing the lives of migrant couples and transnational households, this book explores the dark side of the history of migration in Argentina during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using court records, censuses, personal correspondence and a series of case studies, Maria Bjerg offers a portrayal of the emotional dynamics of transnational marital bonds and intimate relationships stretched across continents. Using microhistories and case studies, this book shows how migration affected marital bonds with loneliness, betrayal, fear and frustration. Focusing primarily on the emotional lives of Italian and Spanish migrants, this book explores bigamy, infidelity, adultery, domestic violence and murder within official and unofficial unions. It reveals the complexities of obligation, financial hardship, sacrifice and distance that came with migration, and explores how shame, jealousy, vengeance and disobedience led to the breaking of marital ties. Against a backdrop of changing cultural contexts Bjerg examines the emotional languages and practices used by adulterous women against their offended husbands, to justify domestic violence and as a defence against homicide. Demonstrating how migration was a powerful catalyst of change in emotional lives and in evolving social standards, Emotions and Migration in Early Twentieth-century Argentina reveals intimate and disordered lives at a time when female obedience and male honour were not only paramount, but exacerbated by distance and displacement.

Studies that connect the Spanish 17th and 20th centuries usually do so through a conservative lens, assuming that the blunt imperialism of the early modern age, endlessly glorified by Franco's dictatorship, was a constant in the Spanish imaginary. This book, by contrast, recuperates the thriving, humanistic vision of the Golden Age celebrated by Spanish progressive thinkers, writers, and artists in the decades prior to 1939 and the Francoist Regime. The hybrid, modern stance of the country in the 1920s and early 1930s would uniquely incorporate the literary and political legacies of the Spanish Renaissance into the ambitious design of a forward, democratic future. In exploring the complex understanding of the multifaceted event that is modernity, the life story and literary opus of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) acquires a new significance, given the weight of the author in the poetic and political endeavors of those Spanish left-wing reformists who believed they could shape a new Spanish society. By recovering their progressive dream, buried for almost a century, of incipient and full Spanish modernities, Ana Maria G. Laguna establishes a more balanced understanding of both the modern and early modern periods and casts doubt on the idea of a persistent conservatism in Golden Age literature and studies. This book ultimately serves as a vigorous defense of the canonical as well as the neglected critical traditions that promoted Cervantes's humanism in the 20th century.