Even a cursory glance at recent books on extremism makes clear the kinds of emotions that most scholars and policymakers see as central to the appeal of the radical right. Titles like Age of Anger, Strangers in Their Own Land and Angry White Men point to negative feelings like alienation, isolation, anxiety, anger and frustration.… Continue reading “How Love Drives Extremism”
Roger Eatwell coined the term ‘cumulative extremism’ in his influential article on community cohesion from 2006. He argued that ‘different forms of extremisms are constructed in discourse’ by extremist groups to legitimise their own activities, and also noted the ‘varieties of such interactions’. Sometimes, Eatwell argued, extremists could even identify positive features in their chosen… Continue reading “The British Extreme Right, Reciprocal Radicalisation and constructions of the Other”
For my September CARR Blog, there can be no other choice but to recall the events of September 1941, when the Germans murdered over 33,000 Jewish men, women, and children in Kiev, at the Babi Yar ravine, in just two days. On September 19, 1941, the German XXIXth Germany Army Corps and the 6th Army… Continue reading “Babi Yar: Mass Murder in Kiev”
The recent right-wing surge in Germany is marked by an increasing degree of dispersal among radical-right actors. New parties, movements, groupuscules, think tanks and media outlets have emerged since 2013 (when the Alternative for Germany party, the AfD, was founded), fundamentally transforming the radical-right field and causing a lack of strategic coordination and ideological coherency.… Continue reading “Uniting Germany’s Radical Right”
Protest event analysis (PEA) is a method of quantitative content analysis with a long tradition in the study of collective mobilization. Despite its limitations,[i] it offers social scientists the opportunity to document several characteristics of protest over time and across different geographical locations. PEA defines the protest event and not the individual case study as… Continue reading “Automated event extraction tools for the study of the far-right”
The terms ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Anti-Muslim hate’ are used regularly in news coverage of certain events. These have most recently involved incidences of a car ram-raiding worshippers outside a mosque in London, and in the depiction of Muslims in the press more generally. However the definition of ‘Islamophobia’ is contested within academic literature. The term entered… Continue reading “Anti-Muslim Hate: The Definition Problem”
Music has long been a key factor in spreading neo-Nazi ideology, serving both as a tool to attract (young) people and to reproduce identities of those already part of the scene/movement. Indeed, it is through music that the extreme right has voiced its ideas, including racism and xenophobia, othering of ‘internal enemies’, antisemitism as well… Continue reading “Fancy a show? Neo-Nazi concerts in Germany”
Tommy Robinson has been transformed into a truly global figure, a purported martyr for the dispossessed and the most influential radical-right leader in Britain since Sir Oswald Mosley. Following Tommy Robinson’s imprisonment in May for contempt of court, the #FreeTommy campaign demonstrated just how much the British radical right has changed in a short space of time. It has… Continue reading “Tommy Robinson and the Transformation of the British Far Right”
The Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR) is the leading information aggregator and knowledge repository on the radical right, past and present. Above all, CARR intends to lead discussion on the development of radical right extremism around the world. To do this, CARR features work by academic experts on the radical right in… Continue reading “Welcome to Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (#CARR)”
This article is the third in a series on using social network analysis to explain the structure of extremist online communities and events. The paper that this article is based on will be presented at the 10th International Social Informatics Conference on September 26, 2018. Back in 2017 I began collecting and analyzing social media… Continue reading “Understanding the Network of Anti-Muslim Groups on Facebook”