Far-right Ideologies Research Articles

Theorizing Far-Right Foreign Policy: Insights From Germany

What is the far-right’s foreign policy outlook? Although International Relations scholarship has provided important insights into the foreign policy preferences of far-right actors, it has predominantly analysed these political actors under the label of populism and focused on the effects of populism on foreign policy positions. Consequently, we lack a clear understanding of the impact of far-right ideology on foreign policy beliefs and preferences. This article provides a theorization of far-right foreign policy by deriving its key characteristics from far-right ideology. It tests this theoretical framework through a comparative analysis of the foreign policy preferences of the populist radical-right Alternative for Germany and the extreme-right, Neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany. The comparative analysis of primary textual data reveals a shared far-right foreign policy outlook characterized by (1) ultra-nationalism, (2) group-based enmity, (3) authoritarianism, (4) revisionism and reactionism and (5) producerist-nationalistic economic positions, but also some important variations in the pursuit of these positions.

Educational practice in Germany between racism and far-right ideologies

Researching educational responses to far-right youth mobilization and ideologies has so far focused mainly on informal education spaces. We thus know little about how and why teachers seek to respond to these issues in their classrooms in formal education. This is despite the fact that far-right mobilization and attitudes are rising in Germany and are having a political impact. In this article I present data from an 18-month ethnographic study in Berlin’s secondary schools, arguing that it is not only important to understand how teachers conceptualize the problem in their student body but also how teachers seek to address these issues. Through this knowledge, we will be able to better understand and systematically respond to far-right ideologies in classrooms.

Education and the far right: The case of Javier Milei's government in Argentina

The article presents a critical analysis of the educational strategies and proposals of Argentina's new far-right libertarian government, led by Javier Milei. It explores how far-right political forces, both in Argentina and globally, use education as a central tool for consolidating power, building consensus and diffusing ultra-conservative ideologies. Through a critical theory approach, the paper analyses Milei's radical educational reforms, their political, cultural and social implications. The global resurgence of far-right movements is contextualised as part of a multifaceted and transnational phenomenon, where educational policy becomes a battleground for ideological influence. This study contributes to understanding why far-right ideologies are gaining popularity, how they maintain their legitimacy and the crucial role education plays in constructing hegemony.

Immigrants in the Transnational Far Right: Integration through Racisms and Negotiating White Supremacy in a Migratory Context

Despite the historical and contemporary instances of immigrants and their descendants engaging with the far-right, whether through long-distance nationalism or country of residence politics, migration scholarship has surprisingly paid very little attention to this process. In this paper we argue that insufficient engagement with instances of the far-right attracting and mobilizing immigrants and ethnic minorities is a theoretical omission in both migration scholarship and scholarship of the far-right and is related to the reproduction of reified notions of “majority”’ and “minority,” normative assumptions about immigrants’ political activism as inevitably progressive, and methodological nationalism implicit in studying the far-right from a political science perspective. Through an analysis of a case study of Polish immigrants and their descendants in Britain, we demonstrate that these omissions can be bridged by paying more attention to relational processes of constructions of whiteness, the role of systemic racism, and the increasing transnationalization of the far-right. The cases we describe, captured through the notion of integration-through-racisms, are therefore a symptom of both increasing complexities of migration-driven diversity with threatened white privilege as the focus and dynamic changes in global far-right ideologies and strategies.

The state and radicalization: Overlooked perspectives for internationalist far-right scholarship

The purpose of this review essay is to examine four monographs that study the far-right and discuss their approaches as is relevant to the international level of analysis. This essay argues that these monographs engage with international analysis but do so in a way that has generally not been covered by the mainstream political science approaches to the far-right. This essay will first cover the mainstream political science approaches and international approaches of the far-right. Then this article will explore two overlooked approaches: (1) The statist approach to the far-right explores the transnational and domestic development of far-right ideology in specific states. (2) The radicalization approach focuses on the space and place of the far-right. This review essay will consider the international implications of these approaches and highlight key themes and methodologies that may prove useful to international far-right scholarship. This article concludes with the place of these monographs in the international far-right literature and the scope of this article.

The Ambivalence of Far-Right Women: Hate, Trauma, Gender, and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Japan.

While far-right movements are commonly associated with masculinity and women are in the minority, it is notable that they often play significant roles within these movements. To deepen our understanding of the motivations behind women's participation, this study challenges Blee's argument that women's motivations for participating are shaped by their interactions with other members. By using the psychosocial method devised by Hollway and Jefferson and developed by Gadd, the present study argues that women's pre-participation experiences can play a vital part in drawing them to the movements. Through analyzing the life stories of six far-right women in Japan and conducting an in-depth case study of three of them, the study aims to uncover a wide range of experiences that may initially appear unrelated to far-right ideology but ultimately led these subjects to become involved in far-right movements. It highlights the importance of paying attention to their complex subjectivities, which are formed by the interplay between their unique trajectories and societal transitions concerning gender norms, particularly within the era of neoliberal "emancipation." The study finds that the duality of far-right movements, which combine conservatism with deviance, enables some women to express paradoxical desires that they experience in response to living through a transitional era.

The case against “alt-right”: A review and typology of scholarly approaches

ABSTRACT Scholars and journalists frequently use the term “Alt-right” to encapsulate a broad collection of identities and ideologies within the political right. Although early interpretations of the “Alt-right” provide a valuable foundation for understanding the range of (far)-right ideologies that have grown in recent decades, current characterizations remain fraught in the wider literature. To sharpen understandings of the “Alt-right” in academic discourse, I offer a typology outlining five common approaches scholars use to portray it, showing how scholarship routinely lacks definitional clarity. Consequently, I argue that the continued use of the term in academic literature is ill-advised. Specifically, the term normalizes and perpetuates the white supremacist ideologies entrenched within the broader history of academia; it hinders historically and theoretically grounded examinations of (far)-right variations and their situatedness within spectrum of far-right ideologies worldwide; and it blurs crucial distinctions between them that precludes the meaningful evaluation of their extremist tendencies and material threats.

Right-Wing Extremism and Terrorism with Roots In (Neo)Colonization

Many Western countries and their citizens react to right-wing extremism as if it were a coup against the democratic rule of law. This article explores the reasons for this. It does so as follows. First, by outlining what is meant by right-wing extremism. But also by addressing the theories that right-wing extremists use to support their ideology of destruction and subversion. Second, this article examines the numbers of right-wing extremists in Europe and in the European Parliament. In this European Parliament, right-wing extremists have become a party that cannot be ignored. In fact, even Hungary's far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is now taking over the EU presidency for six months. Third, this article addresses the threat of right-wing extremist terrorism. This is done on the basis of a number of states that oppress citizens in their own and neighboring countries, invoking the adage: "one's own country and one's own people come first. Russia and Israel are the two countries most often mentioned. Attention is also paid to individual Western far-right terrorists who target Muslims, sub-Saharan Africans, and the "leftist" elite. Their far-right ideology is strongly discussed in this article. Fourth, we test the hypothesis that the ancestors of right-wing extremists had their first experiences with dismissing the other as inferior and inferior in the former Western colonies. In doing so, we do not close our eyes to neocolonial behavior. The elaboration of this hypothesis is that they treat immigrants, refugees and expatriates in the same way as their ancestors did in the former colonies on the African, Asian and American continents. Isolation, exploitation, enslavement, plundering, looting and torture, as well as genocidal wars, were the order of the day. Epigenetics shows that the distinction between genotype and phenotype is based on genotypic changes due to phenotypic conditions. In short, poor living conditions due to institutional racism, stress, pollution, overcrowding and deprivation lead to negative genetic changes. The victims of epigenetic transformation are mainly immigrants, refugees and expatriates in Western countries and the original populations in the former Western colonies. Finally, this article shows that it is a significant number of immigrants, refugees, and expatriates who are told by right-wing extremists that they are not welcome in their continent, country, province, neighborhood, and street. With God's evidence, this article shows that human beings were not created to fight each other with fire and sword.

The toponymic battle: Renaming streets in Santiago de Chile 50 years after the military coup

ABSTRACT In July and August of 2023, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the military coup in Chile (September 11, 1973), the Santiago City Council chose to honor the civil-military dictatorship victims by renaming 12 streets in the district. Unexpectedly, the Namur neighborhood, which had a one-block street set to be renamed “Ida Amelia Vera Almarza”—a dictatorship victim—mobilized and vehemently protested the decision. Utilizing a critical approach based on grounded theory and thematic analysis—in which the analysis arises “bottom-up” from an inductive triangulation of various sources—this article examines the reasons for opposing this renaming. The results reveal two primary reasons for opposition: the community’s need to preserve their historical identity embodied in the street’s name (Namur) and their feeling of exclusion and mistreatment. Contrary to some perceptions, this opposition was not driven by denialist or far-right ideologies. Thus, this article offers a novel viewpoint that extends beyond the traditional scholarly understanding of memory politics and suggests that memory battles are not solely about clashes between those for and against victim memorialization. Hence, it urges scholars and practitioners to delve deeper into the motivations behind the opposition to memory and human rights policies.

Wellness and white power: a fantasy theme analysis of U.S. wellness influencer content and its utilization of white power discourse

ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 pandemic, wellness influencers used far-right ideologies to spread misinformation about health and wellness on social media. Extending the application of symbolic convergence theory (SCT) in this study, I argue that these influencers are an identifiable rhetorical community that utilize white power discourse to facilitate convergence. A fantasy theme analysis of Instagram posts reveals several important fantasy themes. They include mother-as-warrior, where mothers are situated as revolutionary agents against the state, paramilitary wellness, which highlights influencers’ calls for active resistance against health-related government mandates, and homeschooling and homesteading as both forms of resistance and idealized representations of a “well” life. These themes serve as the rhetorical foundations of this community and have several important implications for understanding the proliferation of white power rhetoric in online spaces, including the potential for violence.

A gathering storm: offensive and defensive accelerationism in an online far-right community

ABSTRACT Increasingly fringe and violent far-right ideologies have become a significant threat to national security in Western countries in the twenty-first century. Accelerationism is growing in far-right narratives while populism and ethnocentrism garnered public attention. This study presents an empirical study of Stormfront, the largest and oldest online white nationalist community in the world, to identify accelerationist themes in the ideological narratives used to discuss white nationalist philosophy over time. The study applied a Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithm and a supervised learning AI model to a corpus of more than 66 m words collected from 367,000 posts across a 20-year period. This analysis identified two kinds of accelerationist sentiment in the dataset, an offensive form, which portrays violence as both an inevitable and desirable mechanism to pursue political change, and a defensive form, which portrays violence as a reactionary and protective means to prevent undesirable social changes. The study then used a thematic analysis on a subset of the data to support its findings that both offensive and defensive accelerationism are embedded in ideological narratives on Stormfront. This is an important consideration for further research on ways that accelerationism may be influencing popular white nationalist ideology, particularly fringe and violent narratives.

Discursive pragmatics of justification in terrorist threat texts: Victim-blaming, denying, discrediting, legitimating, manipulating, and retaliation

This article explores the under-researched area of discursive tactics employed in terrorist threat texts that exploit moral values to constantly justify violence, fostering a ‘discourse of justification’, disaffiliation and conflict. Employing a discursive pragmatic analysis, it delves into the tactics of violent extremists associated with jihadism and far-right ideologies. Utilising the Appraisal framework and the ‘moral disaffiliation’ strategy, the study uncovers verbal practices shaping a dynamic of justification. Findings reveal threateners’ involvement in regulatory discursive functions – manipulation, deontic-retaliation, and boulomaic effect – and practices of ideologically positioning functions – discrediting, blaming, denying and (de)legitimating. The analysis highlights the construction of negative victim individuals and societies while praising the threatener/in-group, anchored predominantly in values of propriety, capacity, valuation and veracity, as the primary dynamic of threatener-victim disalignment. This study contributes insights into threatener profiling, motivations of violence and future research on threat-genre rhetorical structure analysis.

Distorted Truth

This work draws a connection between the authoritarian conservatism of the Brazilian military dictatorship and the ideology present during Jair Bolsonaro's administration, while shedding light on the role of the secretive and feared intelligence and repression apparatus in Brazil during the military regime, known as DOI-CODI. It analyzes the autobiographical work "A Verdade Sufocada" by Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, former commander of DOI-CODI, and its influence on contemporary far-right ideology. Additionally, it addresses the media's contribution to the formation of social memory and forgetting, especially concerning Brazil's dictatorial past. The study demonstrates how certain elements of the dictatorship, such as nationalism, conservatism, and persecution of leftist groups, are still present in the ideological movements of the New Right. The analysis offers a critical perspective on Bolsonarism and its legacy stemming from a period of human rights violations and the suppression of democratic freedoms.

Representations of gender in conspiracy theories: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT This paper examines how gender is represented within conspiracy theories by drawing on data from a corpus composed of conspiracy theory documents. It presents an analysis of the collocates of gendered nouns, highlighting the ways that conspiracy theorists use language to reinforce connections between religiosity and masculinity and understandings of femininity that rely on biological gender essentialism. Further, this paper highlights the overlap in values between religious masculinity and hegemonic masculinity that occur within this discourse. It also argues that the ways in which gender is represented in conspiracy theory discourse shares links to far-right ideology, even when the conspiracies in question do not have direct or overt connections to the far-right.

Purity and Unity: Narcissism and Destructiveness in Nationalistic and Fundamentalistic Ideologies

Abstract: In recent decades, Western societies have been exposed to increasing dynamics of change and crisis as a result of ongoing globalization, and of flight and displacement in many regions of the world. The insecurity and humiliation of being more exposed to global developments than being able to influence them leads many people to seek social security. As a result, populist and far-right ideologies have become increasingly attractive to some. There has also been a revival of authoritarian thinking. Based on Erich Fromm’s concept introduced in the 1930s, its current forms are described in terms of the narcissistic self- and other-dynamics. Social science data show that, in addition to authoritarian thinking, a narcissistic longing for a homogeneous society makes populist and far-right ideologies increasingly attractive. If we analyze this phantasm of a homogeneous nation, we find at its root unconscious fantasies of care and sibling rivalry, of purity and the idea of the Other, the fantasy of a protective whole. Such ideal-narcissistic states of purity and homogeneity do not tolerate divergences and are therefore associated with paranoia and violence. Ultimately, the irreversibility of difference and ambivalence in human life is denied.

Holocaust Analogies, Conspiracy Theories, and Far-Right Victimhood: Forum for Democracy and the Future of Holocaust Memory in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between the Far Right and Holocaust memory politics in the Netherlands through an in-depth analysis of the antisemitic and conspiratorial discourse of far-right politician Thierry Baudet and his party, Forum for Democracy (FvD). While the FvD positioned themselves as a victim of establishment politics from the outset, the party used their opposition to government COVID-19 policies to bolster the image of themselves as victim of state power as well as Jewish conspiracies. This article argues that Baudet’s Holocaust relativization and his criticism of the evolving character of Dutch Holocaust memory are intimately tied to his and the FvD’s antisemitic worldview, in which Jews are to blame for the decline of a mythologized white, Christian Dutch nation. In this context, the FvD used Holocaust analogies on social media, in the Dutch parliament, and during rallies to simultaneously accuse Jews of exploiting a victim identity for moral legitimacy and to contest the government’s acknowledgment of Dutch collaboration and inclusion of Jewish experiences into a broader national narrative of the Second World War. In posing these challenges to the status of the Holocaust in contemporary memory politics, Baudet and the FvD attempt to rewrite Dutch history with the white, Christian population as the true bearers of Dutch heritage and identity. Examining the character and normalization of Holocaust relativization in a country still lauded internationally for its tolerance despite its delayed process of ‘coming to terms’ with its Holocaust past demonstrates the centrality of memory politics to far-right ideologies.

Hindutva Civilizationism in India: Unravelling the Human-Ecological Conditions

India’s Hindutva movement, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, has risen to power in the world’s largest democracy and second-most populous country. Various scholars have examined how Hindu nationalism is rooted in civilizational themes; others have examined how ancient Hindu elements are employed in BJP environmental politics. Yet a comprehensive and interdisciplinary conceptualization of civilizationism that places it, firstly, at the heart of Hindutva and, secondly, confronts it as not solely a discursive or thematic tool but as the manifesting of physical control over citizens’ relationships to their material environment is lacking. This means approaching ‘civilization’ in the far right as a human-ecological structure and not only a historical bedrock of ethno-territorial and theocratic power. In order to conceptualize Hindutva civilizationism, I re-examine two well-known cases of Sangh Parivar environmental politics: (1) Hindutva geography and spatial violence; and (2) anti-meat and cow vigilante politics. Beyond serving as a discourse that ignites violence and far-right extremism, I showcase how the sounding board of ‘civilization’ encapsulates the relationship between sociopolitical and environmental far-right objectives, highlighting the ways that far-right civilizationism seeks to define human relationships with natural and built environments. Conceptualizing civilizationism in this way strengthens understandings of how the racial, ethno-national, and religious features of far-right politics are rooted in ecological doctrine that is often based on the social-material features of past ‘civilization’. This supports the primordial significance of civilizationism in far-right ideology beyond only the white supremacist far-right and ‘Western Civilization’.

Downlining Disinformation: How MLM Distributors Use Gendered Strategies for Recruitment and Pastel QAnon Indoctrination

doTERRA and Young Living are multi-level marketing (MLM) companies sustained by distribution networks of women who sell their trademark essential oil products. We argue that women join essential oil MLMs based on an iterative, three-pronged strategy that not only recruits women as oil distributors but also simultaneously indoctrinates them to pastel QAnon conspiracy spaces: digitally driven, feminized realms situated at the nexus of New Age spirituality, wellness, and far-right ideologies. MLM distributors first compel women to look toward essential oils as a viable medical intervention by leveraging potential recruits’ distrust with medical establishments and hardship produced by intersecting structural inequalities (classism, racism, ableism, sexism). Women are then hooked in by promises of essential oils offering silver-bullet solutions to complex problems stemming from inequitable social systems. Finally, women get downlined into pastel QAnon disinformation flows through algorithmic production of confirmation bias. By coding qualitative data of MLM distributors and pastel QAnon influencers for digital content analysis, we identify socio-cultural and gendered trends of disinformation production at the intersections of wellness, pastel QAnon, and structural inequalities. These findings provide insights into the seductive appeal of disinformation beyond the textual content of the message and contribute to our understanding of the larger political economy of incentives and rewards that perpetuate disinformation-for-hire communities.

A comparative study of the electoral rhetoric of extreme right-wing parties in Germany and Russia

This article compares the electoral rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) parties through the prism of the level of antagonization and the parties’ point of view on topical social issues. Discourse analysis is conducted using discourse frames and blocks, allowing formalizing the comparison between texts in different languages. The sample is based on party videos published online in April — May 2021 in the run-up to the upcoming federal elections in both countries. The LDPR uses more antagonistic rhetoric, especially against Western countries and Ukraine. The AfD uses we to unite its electorate, seeing the German and European establishment as its opponents, as well as organizations with an international agenda, including the Greens and the Antifa movement. Both parties raise important social issues such as immigration, digitalization, political freedoms, and national identity, but differences in emphasis emerge. The AfD is more likely to raise issues of economic freedom for business and the defense of German burgher culture against the leftist agenda, while the LDPR is focused on supporting Russian foreign policy and Russian culture against Western globalism. The authors also emphasize that modern far-right parties support democratic principles. Nationalism remains central to far-right ideology, but it is drifting towards democracy under the influence of sociocultural processes. The study aims to improve understanding of the dynamics of far-right political discourse in Germany and Russia. The theoretical developments allow us to expand the application of discourse analysis of political rhetoric.

The Risks to Germany’s Peace and Security Generated by the Reichsbürger Movement or “Citizens of the Reich” Based on Political and Religious Convictions

In recent years, the extreme right in Germany has expanded, the phenomenon gaining momentum. The far-right groups and organisations in Germany were, are and will be dominated by an ideology that amalgamates religious or non-religious ideas but that defends German culture and spirituality according to its visions and objectives. Adherents of far-right ideology combine these ideas with conspiracy theories, and on such a background, some of them change their attitude towards society and become violent. For example, right-wing extremists attacked the Parliament, the symbol of democracy, for the first time in Germany, namely on 29 August 2020, and later on 6 January 2021, protesters, including right-wing extremists, attacked the Congress of the United States of America. One of the organisations, such as the Reichsbürger Movement, which means Citizens of the Reich, who reject the current borders of Germany and want the return to those established in 1871, set up cells and planned activities recently catalogued as terrorists by German prosecutors, in December 2022 and May 2023. For the Citizens of the Reich, there is no Federal Republic of Germany because this country is part of a conspiracy and part of a satanic state system, and they recognise only Imperial Germany. According to the religious beliefs of some of them, the imperial constitution was received from God and must be respected, and they are in an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. The model invoked by some of them is that of Jesus Christ who changed society, erroneously invoking biblical precepts to bolster their claims.