Book Launch: Shaping Nations and Markets

Speaker: Vinicius Rodrigues Vieira

Shaping Nations and Markets develops a theoretical framework and employs a mixed-methods approach to make sense of the rise of nationalist-populist movements in the 21st century. Instead of assuming that the current wave of populism stems from backlash against economic globalisation, the book investigates how material and symbolic factors interact with each other in advanced industrial democracies and emerging powers to generate the political movements that brought politicians like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, and Donald Trump in the United States into power.

A crucial part of the argument is the concept of identity capital. That is the case as ethnic, racial, and religious cleavages are what ground narratives of national identity. Hence, minorities (like the Brazilian Evangelicals crucial for Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018) or vanishing majorities (like non-Hispanic whites in the US) have incentives to increase or at least keep their identity capital – that is, the form of power that stems from their recognition as members of the nation.

Vinícius G. Rodrigues Vieira is a Professor of Public Policy at the Brazilian Institute of Development, Research, and Education (IDP), an Associate Professor of Economics and International Relations at the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP), a Lecturer in International Relations at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV),  and a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study of the University of São Paulo (IEA-USP). He holds a doctorate from Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and is the author of Shaping Nations and Markets: Identity Capital, Trade, and the Populist Rage (Routledge, 2024). Since 2023, he has been serving as the co-chair of the research committee on International Political Economy of the International Political Science Association (IPSA).