Fizza Batool

Contact: fizza.batool(at)szabist.edu.pk

Assistant Professor, SZABIST University, Karachi, Pakistan

Dr. Fizza Batool is an academic and policy researcher interested in Populism, Religious Nationalism, Comparative Politics, and Democratization. Being a pragmatist, she uses both qualitative and quantitative techniques in her works. Her recent work “Populist Discourse in Pakistani Politics” is the first comprehensive book on the populism of Pakistan.

Exclusionary Populism with State-Supported Religious Nationalism: A Comparative Analysis of Pakistan and Israel

While much research explores populism in secular transatlantic contexts, Pakistan and Israel offer critical case studies where populism interacts with established religious identities, posing distinct challenges and dynamics. The proposed project aims to comparatively analyse the contemporary cases of exclusionary populism: Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Imran Khan in Pakistan, examining the different ways in which pre-existing religious narratives shape populist discourses. Using Laclau’s (2005) conception of populism, the project will analyse how these leaders develop a new chain of equivalence around the pre-existing nodal points to challenge the elite and target the out-groups. For the comparative analysis of the key frames, narratives, and uses of religious symbols by the two leaders, I will conduct a discourse analysis of their public addresses, interviews, and content analysis of social media posts.