Global Culture War

The trajectory of global culture war politics traced through the emergence, evolution, and international spread of the term “woke”Disavowals of wokeness by politicians and others are an everyday occurrence. How did “woke,” once a positive call to be aware of racial injustice, become a pejorative aimed at political enemies? In The Global Culture War, A. Maurits van der Veen and Erik Bleich analyze how the term diffused from Black activists in America to the wider public in the United States and beyond, transforming into shorthand for the broader culture war. They draw on comprehensive datasets of traditional media, social media, and Google searches across multiple countries, as well as linguistic theories of semantic change, to show how political actors succeeded in changing the meaning of “woke.”Tracing the spread of the term to Britain, France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, van der Veen and Bleich examine the strategic choices made by politicians who apply culture war rhetoric to their own concerns. In the Netherlands, for example, “woke” was introduced into discourses on gender and Islam, while in France, it stands for American-style identity politics in opposition to the French republican model of integration. Their account offers an important new perspective on how culture wars shape modern politics and how they may evolve in the future.