"This book invites us to look at popular culture as a major repertoire of biopolitical metaphors that can then be instrumentalized by populist leaders. With this innovative, bottom-up approach, Andrey Makarychev offers us a fascinating dive into Eastern European culture and politics. A must-read to re-think how sovereignty and governmentality are experienced at a more grassroots level." -- Marlene Laruelle, Director, Illiberalism Studies Program, The George Washington University "Theoretically nuanced and empirically rich, this original and thought-provoking new book by Andrey Makarychev prompts us to rethink right-wing populism from the perspective of biopolitics. By analysing how and why populists protect and enhance the lives of some citizens while marginalising and threatening others, he skilfully demon-strates the close interrelationship between biopolitical dynamics and populism in Estonia, Ukraine and Russia. Challenging standard approaches to the study of populism which take the populist political actor as the starting point of their analyses, Makarychev highlights the importance of popular culture as a key generator of populist meanings, showing how these meanings are then converted into political claims by populist power contenders and holders. This original approach looks set to make an important contribution to our understanding of the mechan-ics of populism in the post-Soviet world and beyond." -- Prof.

Richard C. M. Mole, Professor of Political Sociology, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London " Popular Biopolitics is an original, well-researched, theoretically laden, and very engaging work shedding light on Estonian, Ukrainian, and Russian versions of popular biopolitics as they existed before the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. [.] the escalation of Russian aggression in Ukraine and associated changes in regional biopolitics in no way diminish the relevance of the book but, on the contrary, add extra depth and historical value to it." -- Kostiantyn Yanchenko, University of Hamburg , in: H-Net Reviews (July 2022).