2023
Webinar on The Farsi manosphere of Iran.
Lecturer: Sama Khosravi Ooryad, University of Gothenburg. Online.
Date: March 15 2023
This talk examines the rising Farsi ‘manosphere’ of Iran and the case of online misogynistic, anti-feminist and anti-queer mobilisations across social media platforms and messaging applications. It focuses on memes and memetic figures that are circulated on Iranian social media to highlight complicated and unforeseen mutations of today’s internet meme culture and online hate culture. Moreover, the research unpacks the increasing convergences of seemingly conflicting online and political contexts. Drawing on digital ethnographic fieldwork on selected platforms as well as visual and conceptual analyses of memes, this research theorises that online figurations of hate have memeto-(micro)political qualities that allow for their propagation across numerous contexts. Furthermore, the case of Iran’s emergent Farsi manosphere is arguably not a totalitarian exception unique to the Middle East but is reconfiguring and standing in alliance with the global rise of the right and its online culture wars.
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Understanding the Radical Right from a Global South Perspective
Lecturer: Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, University College Dublin.
Date: May 31 2023, Zoom.
In this talk, I will present the edited volume, The Rise of the Radical Right in the Global South (Routledge, 2023, co-edited with Tatiana Vargas-Maia), which offers a framework for understanding the emergence and consolidation of different radical right movements in Global South countries in the 21st century. Not long ago, India, Brazil and the Philippines, for example, were countries globally celebrated as emerging economies that consolidated vibrant democracies. Nonetheless, they never overcame structural problems, including economic inequality, social violence, cultural conservatism, and political authoritarianism. Conventional scholarship on the rise of the radical right tends to be centred around the Global North political economy. The book proposes a shift of focus in examining such a trend, adopting a view from the South. We argue that the radical right in the Global South should be analysed through specific lenses, considering national historical patterns of political and economic development and instability. This does not mean abandoning a transnational understanding of the radical right; rather, it calls for the opposite: we examine how the radical right is invented, modified, and resisted in specific regions of the globe, seeking to understand how the Southern experience can shed light on the rest of the world.
The Populist Radical Right beyond Europe
Lecturers: Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile) and Lisa Zanotti (Diego Portales University)
Date: Aug 30 2023, Zoom
Athough the populist radical right (PRR) has become a global phenomenon, research about it focuses much more on Europe than on other regions. To counter this imbalance, this talk, based on a recent special issue in the journal Language and Politics, provides comparative evidence on the discourse elaborated by the PRR in six non-European countries: Australia, Brazil, Chile, India, Turkey, and the United States. As we show, non-European PRR forces articulate authoritarian, nativist, and populist ideas in different ways than their European brethren and they employ specific ideological elements (e.g., neoliberalism and religion) to advance discourses that resonate with the social grievances that are preponderant in the context wherein they operate. This reveals that part of the success of the PRR is related to its discursive flexibility and capacity to adapt itself with the aim of constructing frames that connect with the anxieties experimented by segments of the voting public across different national and regional settings.
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Race, gender, and Occidentalism in global reactionary discourses: China as method
Lecturer: Chenchen Zhang, Durham University
Date: Nov 29, 2023
This talk seeks to contribute to a global understanding of reactionary discursive formations at the current historical conjuncture, foregrounding the centrality of global whiteness, masculinism, and a renewed imagination of “the West” as well as gendered East/West binaries. This entails not only attending to the operation of reactionary sensibilities, tropes, and memes in “non-white” and “non-Western” geographies, but also examining the particular imaginaries of the global integral to their operation in both the West and the Global Easts. I first illuminate global and civilizational imaginaries integral to the resurgence of authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, and social conservativism across diverse settings. I then scrutinize the workings of global racial entanglements, masculinism, and gendered East/West binaries in Chinese anti-baizuo discourse, encompassing both techno-nationalist communities on social media and self-styled “Trumpist” intellectuals critical of the Chinese regime. While they both reproduce the far right metanarrative about the “Western civilization”, imagined to be racially pure and socio-politically masculine in the past, being threatened by ethnocultural diversity and an emasculating political culture, they incorporate these representations within different ideological constellations and positionings in relation to global whiteness and liberal hegemony. The talk contributes to the growing literature elucidating that reactionary counter-movements to liberal orders emerge within rather than against liberal and neoliberal structures.
2022
Webinar on the Far Right in Indonesia
Lecturer: Nathaniël Kunkeler, C-REX
Date: June 1, 2022
This talk by Nathaniël Kunkeler will examine the emergence and collapse of the far-right in colonial Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies) in 1918-1942. This political scene was principally characterised by reactions against the Dutch colonial government’s so-called ‘Ethical Policy’ which offered Indonesians a vague prospect of independence and tolerance of native political organisation, and the emergence of fascism in the Netherlands and the Indies. As such the Indonesian far-right was above all a product of the white settler (totok) population, represented by groups like the Fatherland Club and the Dutch Indies Fascist Organisation, and the Indonesian branches of the Dutch National Socialist Movement in the thirties. However, these far-right politics also crossed racial lines and held appeal for Indo-European beneficiaries of the imperial system, while fascist ideas and tactics also found traction among Indonesian nationalist organisations such as the Partai Indonesia Raja. This was partially made possible by uncommonly relaxed attitudes towards race in the Dutch fascist organisations. The Indonesian far-right in this era was thus heavily characterised by transnational movements facilitated by imperial structures and contexts, and consequently collapsed alongside those structures with the onset of the Second World War.
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Webinar on the Far Right in Malaysia
Lecturer: Munira Mustaffa
Date: Jan.12, 2022
What does the Far Right look like in a country like Malaysia? The talk will serve to demystify the far right movements in Southeast Asia and explain how they did not just develop overnight as a form of “reciprocal radicalisation”, but in fact have extensive pre-war historical roots in the search for post-colonial identities and claiming the birthright to a homeland. The talk will also discuss the characteristics of Malaysia’s far right movements – ranging from those that were formed before the advent of social media to those that emerged from the digital landscape, along with their very diverse profiles. The talk will also address broad questions of why the phenomenon would matter in terms of policy and security.
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Webinar on the far right in Romania
Lecturer: Ionut Chiruta, University of Tartu
Date: March 9, 2022
The 2020 Romanian parliamentary election results revealed a party that seized the momentum during Covid-19, i.e., the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR). Imitating the modus operandi of the fascist Iron Guard movement from the 30s' and modern transnational far-right groups, AUR morphed from a movement to Romania's fourth-largest political force (9.1%). Already having developed a strong electorate in the large Romanian diaspora, AUR grew its domestic support through a concoction of PR stunts and violent anti-vaccine demonstrations against democratic institutions and procedures. Consequently, in just twelve months, AUR strategies propelled this far-right party towards being the second most popular in the polls, i.e., 20.8%. Building on the work of three working papers that analyze AUR's protest strategies, diaspora mobilization, and incorporation of PR stunts that imitate the Brexit campaign and January 6 insurrection, this presentation hopes to provide a succinct overview of the far-right in Romania.
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Webinar on the Far Right in Central America
Lecturer: Laura Sala, University of Buenos Aires
Date: May 11, 2022
This talk will present an overview of right-wing parties in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala from the Peace Accords (1990s) to the present. This long historical period constitutes two key moments. The first extends until the end of the 2000s and is characterized by the hegemony of neoliberal right-wing parties in the three countries: ARENA in El Salvador (1989-2009); PAN and GANA in Guatemala (1996-2000 and 2004-2008 respectively), and UNO and PLC in Nicaragua (1990-2007). The second moment begins with the neoliberal crisis and the late “pink tide” in the region, between 2007 and 2009, that displaced the political right of the government in all three cases. This moment is characterized by the crisis of the party structures of the neoliberal right, the difficulty of right-wing forces to reorganize themselves in Nicaragua, and the rise of new radical right leadership in Guatemala and El Salvador. I will also identify changes and continuities linked to the social base of the parties, and their positions regarding the role of the state in the economy, democracy, and the rights of minorities.
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2021
Webinar on the Far Right in Latin America with focus on Brazil
Lecturer: Ariel Goldstein, University of Buenos Aires
Date: Feb 3, 2021
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Webinar on the Far Right in Japan
Lecturer: Naoto Higuchi, Waseda University
Date: March 3, 2021
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Webinar on the Far Right in South Africa
Lecturer: Haley McEwen (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)
Date: April 7, 2021
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Webinar on the Far Right in Georgia
Lecturer: Tamta Gelashvili (C-REX, UiO)
Date: June 2, 2021
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Webinar on the Far Right in India
Lecturer: Eviane Leidig, International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT)
Date: July 7, 2021
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Webinar on the Far Right in Turkey
Lecturer: Ihsan Yilmaz, Deakin University
Date: Aug 4, 2021
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Webinar on the Far Right in Morocco
Lecturer: Cristina Moreno Almeida, King's College London
Date: Sep 8, 2021
Since 2017, a network of Moroccan Facebook meme pages has emerged claiming to be the Moroccan Right. Under the pretext of being a renewed right-wing leaning Moorish Movement, these pages have rescued local political symbols from the past, such as late King Hassan II or the Marinid flag, in order to formally establish a particular aesthetics of the Moroccan Right. The content they share, however, is also patriarchal, ultra- and ethno-nationalist, misogynist and racist content borrowing symbols of the global ‘alt-right’ such as the Pepe the Frog meme. In doing so, these pages have memetised an entire ecosystem of scapegoats as enemies of the nation. In view of this trend, my talk examines the ways in which the revival of nationalist and far-right tropes is contributing to reshaping local digital political landscapes and pushing towards an Arab Right/Far-Right. Although the Moroccan Far-Right is still negotiating its main tenets, I argue that internet memes are effectively acting as an entry point in the creation of a new ultranationalist alt-right movement.
Webinar on the Far Right in the Philippines
Lecturer: Richard Javad Heydarian
Date: Oct 6, 2021
The talk covers both the structural and contingent factors that presaged the meteoric rise of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who not only upended Asia's oldest democracy, but has also stood as the ultimate embodiment and purveyor of a more macabre and intransigent version of the so-called "Asian values": The self-serving political myth, first propagated by Asian autocrats in the 1980s and 1990s from Singapore to Malaysia, which claimed that liberal 'enlightenment values', namely civil liberties and individual political rights, are both alien to and subordinate in 'Asian' societies, where 'communitarian' values, most especially 'law and order', take precedence under a paternalistic state, which recognizes no independent civil society, first proposed by the likes of Aristotle and G.W.F. Hegel in the West. More broadly, it's a macro-geopolitical analysis of how neoliberal globalization has sprung a new 'double-movement', which has produced a reactionary, far-right backlash against a deracinated liberal elite and decades of non-inclusive development, as opposed to earlier more progressive deglobalization movements in the 1990s following the establishment of the WTO as well as in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 Great Recession. Looking forward, the talk also provides a progoniss of long-term trends for besieged post-colonial democracies from the Philippines to Indonesia, Brazil, India and beyond.
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Webinar on the Far Right in Russia
Lecturer: Elizaveta Gaufman, University of Groningen
Date: Nov 3, 2021
The Ukraine crisis shook and stirred the far-right movements in Russia along the two lines: support for the Novorossiya project in South-East Ukraine as well as Crimea annexation or denial of Kremlin’s foreign policy and siding with the far-right groups of the Euromaidan. Often a categorization of nationalist movements is based on their attitude to Putin’s regime (Laruelle 2018): “full opposition nationalists” (e.g., Neo-Nazis, perpetrators of racist violence), “mid-opposition nationalists” (pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine), co-opted statist nationalists (support Putin’s regime), and “official nationalists” – those are within the state apparatus and broker the cooperation with grass root, more extreme nationalist organizations. In this talk, however, I will offer an overview of nationalist movements in Russia based on their ideology, showing how some of the far-right argumentation is normalized in the liberal and mainstream circles.
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Webinar on the Far Right in Israel
Lecturer: Arie Perliger, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Date: Dec 1, 2021
The presentation will discuss three unique characteristics of the Israeli far-right. First, while settlers constitute a minority whose goals are not shared by the majority of Israelis, their settlements’ project in the West Bank thrives. Three complementary explanations for this paradox will be discussed and how they helped overcome limited representation within the political system, as well as changes in Israel’s political and strategic environment. Second, the presentation will explain how the Israeli far-right was able both to mainstream its ideological principles as well as effectively delegitimize center-left traditional political concepts. Thus, while the far-right electoral appeal is still limited, it was able to pressure its political rivals to adopt many of its basic ideological rationales. Lastly, how the fact that orthodox religious streams dominate the Israeli far-right impacts its electoral appeal and on church-state relations will be discussed.