Hybrid CoE Working Paper 22: Watching out for populism: Authoritarian logics as a vulnerability to hybrid threat activity

Populism has an underlying authoritarian logic and thus undermines the main checks and balances, and the individual and public rights and liberties that regularly keep excesses of power at bay in a liberal democracy. Hybrid threats present an essentially political challenge to liberal democracies. This Hybrid CoE Working Paper sets out to underline the logic of authoritarianism, which could potentially be pushed to the fullest extent through hybrid threat activity. The paper presents findings that can and should be used to better anticipate the kind of populist political discourse and practices that tend to be leveraged within a hybrid threat campaign.