International Studies Review (2021) 0, 1–26 ANALYTICAL ESSAY Contesting the “Corrupt Elites,” Creating the “Pure People,” and Renegotiating the Hierarchies of the International Order? Populism and Foreign Policy-Making in Turkey and Hungary F ULYA H ISARLIO ˘ GLU AND L ERNA K. Y ANIK Kadir Has University, Turkey U MUT K ORKUT Glasgow Caledonian University, UK AND ˙ I LKE C IVELEKO ˘ GLU ˙ Istanbul Ticaret University, Turkey This article explores the link between populism and hierarchies in interna- tional relations by examining the recent foreign policy-making in Turkey and Hungary—two countries run by populist leaders. We argue that when populists bring populism into foreign policy, they do so by contesting the “corrupt elites” of the international order and, simultaneously, attempt to create the “pure people” transnationally. The populists contest the “elite- ness” and leadership status of these “elites” and the international order and its institutions, that is, the “establishment,” that these “elites” have come to represent by challenging them both in discourse and in action. The creation of the “pure people” happens by discursively demarcating the “underprivileged” of the international order as a subcategory based on re- ligion and supplementing them with aid, thus mimicking the distributive strategies of populism, this time at the international level. We illustrate that when populist leaders, insert populism into foreign policies of their respective states, through contesting the “corrupt elites” and creating the “pure people,” the built-in vertical stratification mechanisms of populism that stems from the antagonistic binaries inherent to populism provide them with the necessary superiority and inferiority labels allowing them to renegotiate hierarchies in the international system in an attempt to modify the existing ones or to create new ones. Este artículo explora el vínculo entre el populismo y las jerarquías en las relaciones internacionales examinando la reciente creación de la política exterior en Turquía y Hungría, dos países dirigidos por líderes populistas. Sostenemos que cuando los populistas llevan el populismo a la política exterior, lo hacen impugnando a las “elites corruptas” del orden interna- cional y, a la vez, intentan crear el “pueblo real” a nivel transnacional. Los Hisarlıo˘ glu, Fulya et al. (2021) Contesting the “Corrupt Elites,” Creating the “Pure People,” and Renegotiating the Hierarchies of the International Order? Populism and Foreign Policy-Making in Turkey and Hungary. International Studies Review, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viab052 © The Author(s) (2021). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com