Post-Truth Politics

Across varying global context, the rise of populism and populist leaders have become a significant development in recent years. A peculiar development associated with the populist upheavals internationally has been the phenomenon of post-truth that allegedly takes an ambivalent relationship to truth and depends more on emotional appeals. The surge in the populist movements and policies are backed by post-truth politics that uses social media as a mouthpiece for spreading fake news. Post-truth populists follow a particular model of communication to further their interests. There exists a clear nexus between populism and post-truth and the advent of populism in part explains why post-truth has become an effective political strategy in contemporary world politics. Developments in international politics such as Donald Trump’s election as the president of the United States and the populist movements across Europe compel the experts to relook the established notion of rationality as the source of knowledge. The importance attributed to emotional appeals over rationalist models of knowledge acquisition by post-truth populists challenges the status quo. The spread of post-truth populism is a credible threat to the liberal international order since it believes that liberal norms and policies weaken democracy and are against the welfare of common people. The entry tries to analyze the symbiotic relationship that seems to exist between the phenomena of post-truth and populism in contemporary world politics. It also examines how the development of post-truth populism has affected the role of media as a vital factor in the proper functioning of democracies all over the world.