The Normalisation of the Global Far Right: From Global Financial Crisis to Covid Pandemic

This session explores the global growth of racist, populist far right-wing politics and culture since the onset of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2007.

We ask the following questions:

• What are the connections between the rise of nationalistic and xenophobic populism in various national contexts and the economic and social crises occasioned by financial collapse (GFC from 2007), mass forced migration occasioned by war (2015 refugee crisis) and the Coronavirus pandemic (from 2020)?
• In what ways is male toxicology and militarism connected and framing contemporary far right mobilisation?
• What is the relationship between ‘extreme’ and ‘mainstream’ in these various movements? Is a process of ‘normalisation’ at work and what are its consequences?
• Are the ‘scapegoating’ processes akin to historical fascism?
• How are contemporary right-wing populisms gendered and sexualised?

Apart from contextualising different national and regional examples of far-right ‘extremism’ we seek papers aimed at investigating the emergence of transnational far-right populist movements, acting globally, digitally and locally. We appreciate those approaches, which look more closely at questions of how European colonialism, white supremacy and ideological legacies of empire shape and trigger the rapid rise of far-right violent extremism across the world.

Though the situation looks overall very daunting we would like to hear also about practices and visions of resistance.