Poland

Despite the burgeoning interest in right-wing populism and conspiracy theories in recent years,  little attention has been devoted to their convergence in present-day Poland. What role do these  phenomena play in a country shaped by a turbulent history and collective memories of foreign  domination, contested truths, and betrayal? What meaning do they acquire within a landscape  marked by contemporary political, cultural, and social tensions? And what happens when a  German researcher of Polish heritage – perceived not as a neutral academic observer in the field  but an outsider aligned with Western liberalism and EU influence – enters the Polish (far) right  as the supposed embodiment of a counter-hegemonic agenda? 

This subproject aimed to address this multifaceted lacuna by investigating how populism,  conspiracy theories, and collective memory merged within the milieu of the right-wing populist  party Law and Justice (PiS) to create and sustain the Polish traditionalist symbolic universe in  its struggle for hegemony. Building on immersive ethnographic fieldwork in 2022 and 2023,  this research explored how Polish (far) right voters, grassroots activists, and prominent political figures constructed meaning by engaging in partisan “truth-making” and framing perceptions  of political and historical reality not only in populist and conspiracist, but also nationalist terms  reflecting the continuous relevance of the so-called “Romantic paradigm”. 

A key source of originality derives from the project’s dialectical theoretical and methodological  design, grounded in participant observation and open-ended, semi-structured narrative  interviews, as well as its empirically rich, context-oriented insights into a politically charged research subject. By uncovering the epistemic boundaries and opportunities that shaped  knowledge production in the field, the final results of this subproject contribute to unraveling  the complex dynamics between contested truths, a crisis of trust, and reconfigurations of power  in a post-socialist society.  

A detailed account of this study is forthcoming with Brill and expected to be published by the end of 2026:  

Rachwol Hansson, Olivia. “They Are Out to Partition Us Again: ”Memory, Conspiracy, and the Populist Construction of Reality in the Polish (Far) Right. Leiden/Boston: Brill, forthcoming.