Mobilizing for and against the Far-Right

This book showcases recent scholarship on mobilization for and against the far-right in Europe and the USA, fills in gaps in empirical knowledge on right-wing mobilization and serves as a means to test the robustness of existing social movement theory. The chapters in this book were originally published in Social Movement Studies.

Social movement scholarship has been dominated, until recently, by work on progressive movements. Yet as far-right agendas, narratives, and actors increasingly occupy public space, it is important to recognize, make visible, and understand the important role of grassroots far-right mobilization in facilitating this rise. This book showcases recent scholarship on mobilization for and against the far-right in Europe and the USA, fills in gaps in empirical knowledge on right-wing mobilization, and serves as a means through which to test the robustness of existing social movement theory.

Rich case studies covering mobilizing and countermobilizing in Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Turkey, Tunisia, the UK, and the USA offer novel insights into this understudied area of political contention. Contributors follow a diverse range of approaches and lines of inquiry, meaning that readers will come away not only with a better picture of the dynamics of right-wing mobilization but also with a robust understanding of key areas of social movement scholarship. This book will be of interest to anyone wanting to better understand the rise of far-right movements, their role in contemporary contentious politics, and grassroots efforts to contest them.

The chapters in this book were originally published in Social Movement Studies.

Autorentext

Cristina Flesher Fominaya is Professor of Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is Editor in Chief of Social Movement Studies and Founding Editor of Interface Journal. Her latest books are Democracy Reloaded (2020) and Social Movements in a Globalized World (2020).

Damon Eguiarte Flesher is Managing Editor at Social Movement Studies and has also collaborated as Managing Editor on the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary European Social Movements: Protest in Turbulent Times (Flesher Fominaya and Feenstra 2020). Damon also works as a translator (Spanish-English).

Inhalt

Mobilizing for and against the Far-Right: An Introduction 1. Activating the socialist past for a nativist future: Far-right intellectuals and the prefigurative power of multidirectional nostalgia in Dresden 2. Local leaders in national social movements: The Tea Party 3. Both roads lead to Rome: Activist commitment and the identity-structure nexus in CasaPound. 4. Defending democracy against the 'Corona dictatorship'? Far-right PEGIDA during the COVID-19 pandemic 5. Decentralized hate: Sustained connective action in online far-right community 6. Anti-nationalist Europeans and pro-European nativists on the streets: Visions of Europe from the left to the far right 7. Demobilising far-right demonstration campaigns: Coercive counter-mobilisation, state social control, and the demobilisation of the Hess Gedenkmarsch campaign 8. A tale of two campaigns: understanding the role of short-term political context in Czech and Slovak counter/mobilizing on migration 9. Retweet solidarity: Transatlantic Twitter connectivity between militant antifascists in the USA and UK 10. LGBTQ activism in repressive contexts: The struggle for (in)visibility in Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey