Activists wearing Yellow Safety Vests started taking the streets in France since October 2018. Many commentators linked their grievances to radical right and “anti-establishment” politics. Why is it not so simple?
Ireland’s general election on 8 February saw a proliferation of radical right-wing candidates but did not herald the expected breakthrough of these parties. As Shaun McDaid explains, the little support for the radical right in Ireland is mainly explained by the ability of the political left to more effectively mobilise the electorate on issues other than immigration. While not counting on imminent success, the radical right in Ireland might nevertheless have the stamina to play the long game.
«The coronavirus is a window, enabling us to see alternative ways of organising society,» says Thomas Hylland Eriksen. The Professor in Social Anthropology has been conducting research on crises in an overheated world.
Multiagency collaboration structures are given a central role in preventing the recruitment of youth to extremism. In this study of Nordic policies developed to counter extremism and prevent crime, we have mapped and compared how multiagency collaboration is to be organized, what practices that are to be utilized and the legal frameworks that guides information sharing practices in collaborative work. The findings entail previously unknown discrepancies, similarities and differences between the Nordic countries that can help to inform a sometimes heated and polarized debate on how extremism is being handled.
What role does religion play in Western European politics nowadays? Is it true that the radical right rediscovered religion for its political communication? C-REX visiting fellow Jakob Schwörer and Xavier Romero-Vidal address these questions in a recently published article in “Religion State and Society”. The text analysis on 36 European parties suggest that nativist parties are focusing on rejecting a religious outgroup, namely Islam, but hardly refer to religious in-groups such as Christians. Since the radical right rarely refers to other religious dimensions than the exclusion of Muslims, there is limited empirical evidence of the so-called “rise of religion” in party politics.
Researchers from the ARENA-coordinated project GLOBUS will present key findings on the EU and global justice at a policy dialogue in the European Parliament on 3 March 2020.
Over this past week, the Indian capital of Delhi has been home to violence between Hindus and Muslims with a rising death toll each day. Eviane Leidig shows not only how this is the most recent manifestation of a legacy of right-wing extremist activity in India, but also that the response of global far right actors suggest a more disturbing connection between the extreme right in India and the West.
Conspiracy theories have been crucial in the radicalization process of the perpetrator of the Hanau-attack in Germany. Terje Emberland suggests that they were not only important on a political level but also, and perhaps most importantly, on a personal level – as they can help explain why individuals decide to engage in political violence.
On February 19th, a 43-year-old German man carried out a far-right terror attack in the city of Hanau, in central Germany. He shot nine people at two locations in the city centre, as well as his own mother before committing suicide. He left a lengthy manifesto outlining his anti-migrant and racist worldview. In a month marked by the breaking of the country's long-enduring political ‘cordon-sanitaire’ , coupled with evidence of extensive far-right terrorist mobilisation and its most deadly terror attack since 1980, it is clear that Germany’s institutions are at a critical juncture in the struggle against right-wing extremism.
In the aftermath of the festive month, Dutch PhD candidate Iris Beau Segers looks back on the annually recurring issue of Black Pete in the Netherlands, whose blackfaced appearance has been at the heart of a controversial public debate for almost a decade.
The RTV trend report recently published by C-REX shows that, since the 1990s, severe forms of right-wing terrorism and violence in Western Europe have decreased, particularly gang-related and unorganized forms of violence. Today, so-called ‘lone actors’ carry out most of the violence, a trend that has been reinforced by the emergence of various online platforms.
What makes people translate their thoughts and feelings into action? With hate crimes against asylum seekers on the rise across Europe, this question has become increasingly relevant today. C-REX affiliate scholar Iris Segers argues that we need to look more closely at protesting communities, and engage with their stories, in order to understand what drives mobilization against asylum seekers across Western Europe.
John Erik Fossum gave a speech at the annual seminar of the European Parliament Former Members Association in the European Parliament in Brussels on 11 December 2019.
The report «Mixing Logics: Multiagency Approaches for Countering Violent Extremism” is authored by Jennie Sivenbring and Robin Andersson Malmros of the Segerstedt Institute of Gothenburg University.
Through her position as Professor II at the Department of Social Anthropology, Penny Harvey has tried to put people intellectually in touch with each other.
As far right politics is becoming an ever bigger part of mainstream politics, opponents and scholars of the far right have to leave their 20th century thinking behind and critically review their received wisdom. What might have been true in the 1990s, might no longer be true today. Taboos have been broken, preferences have shifted, and the broader political context has become much more accepting to far right politics and politicians.
After the euro crisis in 2009, the common currency was heavily criticised by many politicians. But how do European citizens perceive the euro? Joris Melman studies this question in his PhD project.
The ECPR Standing Group on Extremism & Democracy invites applications for the upcoming Summer School on ‘Concepts and Methods for Research on Far-Right Politics’, which will be held at the Centre for Research on Extremism (C-REX), University of Oslo, from Monday 29 June to Friday 3 July 2020.
- How can you build out an area in the immediate vicinity to an underground station so that people will actually want to be there? asks Thomas Hylland Eriksen. The employment market is opening up for applied anthropology.
How can analysis of ‘credibility contests’ help us understand where and when anti-minority activism is more likely to gain momentum? Joel Busher, Gareth Harris and Graham Macklin draw on their recent research to provide some pointers.
We are very glad to invite you to submit papers and full panels to the 2020 ECPR General conference in Innsbruck, Section Populism, Radicalism and Extremism: At the Margins and into the Mainstream.
The Section is endorsed by the Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy and will be chaired by Pietro Castelli Gattinara (C-REX, University of Oslo), Léonie de Jonge (University of Groningen), and Ofra Klein (European University Institute).
Ethnonationalism has been as common in Georgia as in other post-Soviet countries, but the far-right social movement has especially been gaining traction for the past five years, gradually becoming larger, more diverse, and more violent. The parliamentary elections approaching in 2020 create a window of opportunity for far-right actors to gain access to mainstream politics.
During the last few years, especially around the refugee crisis in 2015-16, vigilante groups popped up all over Europe and North America, patrolling the streets and national borders. They claimed to protect the local citizenry against crime and security threats constituted by illegal migrants and minority groups.
Little is known about how governments put together and put to use policy advisory commissions. In her dissertation, Stine Hesstvedt seeks to find out if and how politics play a role in the Norwegian policy advisory commission system.
Who is a dissident? When did the word enter international political vocabulary, and how did it come to mean human rights activists rather than religious heretics?