This article explores the link between populism and hierarchies in international relations by examining the recent foreign policy-making in Turkey and Hungary—two countries run by populist leaders. We argue that when populists bring populism into foreign policy, they do so by contesting the “corrupt elites” of the international order and, simultaneously, attempt to create the “pure people” transnationally. The populists contest the “eliteness” and leadership status of these “elites” and the international order and its institutions, that is, the “establishment,” that these “elites” have come to represent by challenging them both in discourse and in action. The creation of the “pure people” happens by discursively demarcating the “underprivileged” of the international order as a subcategory based on religion and supplementing them with aid, thus mimicking the distributive strategies of populism, this time at the international level. We illustrate that when populist leaders, insert populism into foreign policies of their respective states, through contesting the “corrupt elites” and creating the “pure people,” the built-in vertical stratification mechanisms of populism that stems from the antagonistic binaries inherent to populism provide them with the necessary superiority and inferiority labels allowing them to renegotiate hierarchies in the international system in an attempt to modify the existing ones or to create new ones.

In this piece, through an alternative reading of biopolitics and merging the literature on necropolitics with critical geography, we develop the concepts necrogepolitics and necropolitical spaces. We argue that the Turkish sovereign has very little difficulty in making death and self-sacrifice a desired behaviour by spatialising necropolitical power domestically and internationally. Necrogeopolitics emerges as a discursive practice that conditions the subject to die for the geopolitical and security interests of the sovereign, necropolitical spaces, on the other hand, are both material and discursive spaces that aim at the same goal at the domestic level. Both spaces condition the subjects for the idea that death is the appropriate behaviour if/when the state is under attack. This modification of social behaviour is engineered by the Turkish state in a very subtle, silent, and everyday manner. We discuss these instances of intervention through the necrogeopolitisation of Turkey’s territorial self, as well as the specific necrospatial changes that took place in the aftermath of the 15 July 2016 coup attempt.

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