I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
By violent populism,
I mean the use of force to support a political candidate for movement or ideology.
And the reason we're in an era of violent populism is
because this is a historically high period of political violence.
If there's one thread that connects unsettling trends across domestic and international affairs today,
it's the return of forms of violence that we once thought were more or less obsolete.
That's true of the return of political violence here in the United States.
It's also true of the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago,
has made a career of studying these types of violence,
whether carried out by American extremists, by suicide bombers,
or by Russian and Israeli fighter jets.
In a series of essays in Foreign Affairs,
he explains why all of these phenomena are likely to endure,
including in the wake of the American presidential election with what he calls an era of violent populism here at home.
Robert Pape, thank you for joining me.
Dan, thanks for having me.
I want to break this conversation into two broad sections,
each based on work you've done for Foreign Affairs in recent months.