In his newest book, Andreu Domingo and invited contributors explore the instrumentalisation of demography by neoconservatives and extreme right-wing populists around the world. Demography is used as an alibi to argue the need to return to a utopian past, where relations of domination based on gender, race and social class are maintained, encouraging conspiracy theories.
Such discourses can be assimilated to what the sociologist Zygmund Bauman described as "Retrotopias": those visions anchored in the past as the search for a utopia of what should not have ceased to be, which most of the time becomes the desire for the imposition of a purified world that will never exist as such.
The origin of a devolution narrative based on demographics can be traced back to the decline in fertility during the first demographic transition - especially in France due to its precociousness - and the anti-immigration movements, especially encouraged by eugenics at the beginning of the 19th century - with a strong presence in the United States. However, since the end of the Baby Boom in European countries and the acceleration of ageing, a new boom in discourses that use demographic metaphors as "information pills" has been observed: Demographic suicide -for fertility-, Demographic Winter -for ageing- and Great Replacement -for immigration-.
This book includes contributions by demographers and sociologists from different universities and research centres on population and demography in Spain, and analyzes the instrumentalisation of demography in the public discourse from three perspectives: 1) "Political discourse", both in Spain and internationally; 2) "Media and public opinion", studying the echo that the media make of it, as well as its public reception; and, 3) "Touchstone", contrasting these narratives with academic demographic analysis for two concrete phenomena: employment and age structure in relation to the pension system, and rural depopulation.
About the author: Andreu Domingo holds a PhD in Sociology, and is a researcher and deputy director of the Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics (CED) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).