Forum: Populism, Identity Politics, and the Archaeology of Europe

Abstract

The kind of liberal and open-minded society on which most academics rely to freely conduct their research is increasingly under threat, even within democratic societies of long standing. The past is by no means neutral in this, whether this be the then American president threatening to attack the antiquities of Iran in early 2020 (a war crime if carried out), or a right-ofcentre UK politician using a prehistoric henge monument to argue that Britain's future should lie outside the European Union (Brophy, 2019). These kinds of developments are generally described as 'populist', a term that refers to the simplification of complex problems and appeals to broad sectors of the population. Here, we follow Müller (2016: 3-4) in arguing that 'populism' also implies exclusionary and polarizing identity politics in which difference and dissent are treated as moral failings rather than questions for compromise.