How to Resist the Far Right

September 11, 2026

How to Resist the Far Right

Verónica Gago and Pankaj Mishra on Reclaiming Language and Building Community

In a conversation with Pankaj Mishra, the scholar and activist Verónica Gago recounted her childhood spent under the looming threats of Argentina's military dictatorship. To grow up in a militant home was to experience both constant fear and an early awareness of political language. Mishra observed how her early exposure to political exile and university activism during the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s helped shape her lifelong commitment to social movements and independent publishing.

That social landscape transformed, Gago said, after the 2001 economic crisis, an upheaval that sparked widespread popular resistance and forced subsequent governments to confront austerity and state impunity. Looking at the global rise of far-right movements, Gago and Mishra emphasized the urgent need to counter political cruelty by reclaiming language, building community connections, and defending daily life against the pressures of financial debt and state-driven austerity.

Participants

Verónica Gago

Verónica Gago, a professor of social sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of San Martín, is a prominent political theorist and activist working on issues of feminism and the global political economy. Her most recent books include A Feminist Reading of Debt (2021, with Luci Cavallero), Feminist International (2020), and Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (2017). She is also a leader in Argentina’s #NiUnaMenos (Not One Women Less) movement as both a theorist and an activist.

Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra is a renowned Indian author, essayist, and literary critic with a global readership. Two of his prize-winning books, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia (2012) and Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), explore the history of colonialism and its enduring legacies in our contemporary global era. Mishra is also the author of two critically acclaimed novels: The Romantics (1999) and Run and Hide (2022). His columns and essays have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, among other outlets. Mishra is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.