Terrorism Studies and the Far Right – The State of Play

Abstract

Terrorism Studies as a specific area of research came to prominence in the aftermath of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA, but had existed across a range of disciplines long before albeit as a less consolidated and certainly less visible subject area. However, despite the existence of a body of work on terrorism, the impact of 9/11 on western perceptions of terrorism ensured that the direction of study was firmly focused on Islamic extremism for many years after the attacks. It is only very recently that significant attention has been focused on other ideologically motivated extremisms, namely the Far-Right. This article examines the nature of research into the Far-Right in the field of terrorism studies and examines what we mean when we refer to the Far-Right, and to what degree the field of terrorism studies has attended to this form of ideological extremism over the past two decades. In order to achieve these aims, this article presents an analysis of the academic publications concerned with the Far-Right produced in three Terrorism Studies journals: Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and Critical Studies in Terrorism. The results demonstrate that between 2001 and 2018 only 41 articles exclusively focus on the Far Right, and of these only 6 use primary data in their analysis. The results of a content analysis carried out on these 41 articles provides an insight into the research trajectory on the Far Right. Ultimately the results of the rapid appraisal and the content analysis speak to the extent to which and nature of how Far-Right terrorism is attended to in the field of Terrorism Studies.