Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This article draws together existing criminological work as well as developments from sociology, political science and media studies to argue that cultural criminology can offer a useful corrective to current ‘counter-extremist’ thinking about the contemporary far right. The first part of the article introduces the contemporary far right, describes how it differs from previous instances, and explains that this resurgent far-right movement has to date primarily been analysed through the lens of ‘counter-extremism’. The second part of the article problematises the concepts of ‘extremism’, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘terrorism’. The article argues that these concepts are ambiguous, imprecise and normative, and that they are freighted with ideological baggage and unsupported by empirical evidence. The third part of the article argues that cultural criminology can better inform our understanding of the contemporary far right owing to its focus on subculture and style, its attendance to networked digital media and its foregrounding of emotion and affect. The article concludes by outlining a tentative programme for cultural criminological research into the contemporary far right.

Keywords

Counter-extremism cultural criminology extremism far right radicalisation subculture terrorism

Introduction

Several scholars have begun to deploy the insights of cultural criminology to further our understanding of contemporary radicalisation and political violence (Cottee, 2020, 2021; Sunde et al., 2021). With some notable exceptions (Castle et al., 2020; Castle and Parsons, 2019) this emergent body of literature has largely neglected to consider the contemporary far right, although some authors have suggested this would be a productive avenue for future research (Cottee, 2020; Sunde et al., 2021). The present article sets out to address this gap in the literature, drawing together existing criminological work as well as developments from sociology, political science and media studies.

The article proceeds in three parts. First, the article briefly introduces the contemporary far right, explaining how it differs from earlier instances. The article explains that this resurgent far-right movement has been analysed primarily through the lens of ‘counter-extremism’. While the discussion of the contemporary far right and counter-extremism in the present article is informed primarily from a British context, it is also illustrative of broader international trends and dynamics. The second part of the article problematises three key terms or concepts within the lexicon of counter-extremism: ‘extremism’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘radicalisation’. The article argues that these concepts are ambiguous, imprecise and normative – that they are freighted with ideological baggage, and unsupported by empirical evidence. The third part of the article suggests that a cultural criminological approach offers a useful corrective to counter-extremist thinking. Specifically, the article considers three ways in which the insights of cultural criminology can better inform our understanding of the contemporary far right: first, cultural criminology’s focus on subculture and style; second, its attendance to networked digital media; and third, its foregrounding of emotion and affect. The article concludes by suggesting some productive future directions for cultural criminological research into the contemporary far right.

The contemporary far right and counter-extremism

The far right is undergoing an international resurgence.¹ Several commentators have described this ascendent movement as the ‘new’ far right (see, for example, Larsen and Jensen, 2023; Sibley, 2024). While important ideological, programmatic, organisational and cultural continuities exist in parts of the movement, the contemporary far right differs from previous iterations in at least four ways: its relationship with the Internet and new media, its relationship with the mainstream; its internal heterogeneity and diversity; and its increasingly networked or ‘post-organisational’ form.

A defining feature of the far right today is that it is not only on the internet, but post-internet (Fielitz and Thurston, 2019; Moore and Roberts, 2021). For Moore and Roberts (2021), the post-internet is ‘not a time after the internet, but a time in which the internet has receded into the background of how life appears simply to be. It is no longer remarkable that politics is mediated through the internet’ (p. 15). Within this context, online activity is no longer an end in itself (as it was with the ‘alt-right’, the largely online white nationalist movement that emerged in the mid-2010s), but, increasingly, a means to galvanise political networking, organising and activism offline. Today an online ecosystem of far-right content creators, livestreams, podcasts and social media communities is catalysing a shift back to real-world organising.

Far-right movements, parties and politicians, as well as commentators and ‘influencers’ – and their ideas, narratives and talking points – have entered the political and cultural mainstream (Miller-Idriss, 2018; Mondon and Winter, 2020). Far-right parties and politicians have enjoyed electoral successes and victories in recent years: the presidencies of Trump in the United States and Bolsonaro in Brazil, the prime ministerships of Orban in Hungary and Meloni in Italy, and the electoral gains of National Rally in France, Vox in Spain, and the Sweden Democrats. We should also look beyond electoral politics to consider the role of the media in mainstreaming the far right (Mondon and Winter, 2020). Commentators have highlighted the role of elite actors in setting the news media agenda in a manner that normalises and legitimates far-right narratives (Mondon and Winter, 2020). At the same time, the contemporary far right has consciously pursued a strategy of cultural intervention or ‘metapolitics’ in an attempt to ‘disseminat[e] and anchor[] a particular set of cultural ideas, attitudes, and values’, thus laying the groundwork for ‘deeper political change’ (Friberg, 2015: 4).

The contemporary far right is heterogeneous, comprising a political milieu that encompasses diverse organisational forms, identities, ideologies and audiences, with ‘increasingly porous and permeable borders’ between them (Larsen and Jensen, 2023: 1). The diverse elements within the contemporary far right are also using the internet and social media to prompt and catalyse offline networking, protest and political violence in a variety of different ways. The lager-drenched ‘pisshead nationalists’ of the far-right football hooligan scene mobilise confrontational street protests through Facebook pages and WhatsApp group chats (Moore and Roberts, 2021); pseudo-intellectual ‘race realist’ bloggers convene at secretive conferences; self-styled citizen journalist ‘migrant hunters’ livestream from outside migrant processing facilities; and accelerationist neo-fascist militants venerate mass shooters and share bomb-making instructions on encrypted messaging applications.

Finally, this organisational, strategic and ideological diversity, combined with the effects of the internet and social media have lent the contemporary far right a distinctly networked character, with some commentators describing the movement as having entered a ‘post-organisational’ phase (Allchorn, 2021; Comerford, 2020; Mulhall, 2018). To characterise the contemporary far right in this manner is not to claim that conventional organisational structures no longer exist, but rather that they are being rendered increasingly irrelevant, as more and more people engaged in far-right politics are able to participate in informal, semi-autonomous, networked forms of activism ‘outside the confines of traditional, organisational structures’, facilitated by the internet and social media (Mulhall, 2018).²

The resurgence of the far right has been accompanied by renewed attention from journalists, scholars and policymakers. Overwhelmingly, the contemporary far right has been viewed through the lens of ‘counter-extremism’ and framed, accordingly, as a problem of ‘extremism’, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘terrorism’. Counter-extremism is something of a paradox: a fundamentally anti-liberal project, it aims to secure and perpetuate liberal democratic capitalism by mobilising both the institutions of the state and wider society to combat non-liberal worldviews, (which it designates as ‘extremist’ regardless of their political content) (Boukalas, 2019). Despite their prevalence, counter-extremist programmes and policies have been criticised for the racist securitisation and criminalisation of (Muslim) social life (Collins, 2021; Sian, 2017; Younis, 2021) – and as ineffective, and even counterproductive in their stated aim of preventing (violent) ‘extremism’ (Blakeley et al., 2019; Faure Walker, 2019a, 2019b; Skoczylis and Andrews, 2020). Nevertheless, counter-extremist thinking continues to inform policy, both directly (through lobbying efforts, and a ‘revolving door’ between counter-extremism thinktanks, academic and government policymaker roles – see CAGE, 2019) and indirectly (through the moral entrepreneur’s role of agenda setting in media and public discourse) – as well as facilitating policy transfer internationally (Kundnani and Hayes, 2018; see Becker, 1963).

Counter-extremism is predicated on a particular way of thinking about how and why people become ‘extremists’ – through a specific ontology of ‘radicalisation’ – and how ‘extremism’ leads inevitably to ‘terrorism’. It is this conceptual language of counter-extremism that the present article seeks to interrogate. Cultural criminologists recognise that the language we use to interpret the social world structures our thinking: Hallsworth and Young (2008) have, for instance, challenged attempts to interpret urban violence through the concept of ‘the gang’. Similarly, zemiological and social harm approaches reject the discourse of ‘crime’ (see, for example, Davies et al., 2021). Accordingly, the subsequent section of this article problematises three key terms within the counter-extremist lexicon: ‘extremism’, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘terrorism’.

The language of counter-extremism

‘Extremism’

Although lawmakers, policymakers and academics have struggled to define ‘extremism’, the term is now used widely, imprecisely and uncritically (Zedner, 2021). The British government defines extremism as: ‘vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’ (HM Government, 2011, emphasis added). This is a bizarre and expansive definition that ‘defines extremism negatively not by what it promotes but by reference to what it opposes. . . the word ‘including’ implies that the list is not definitive’ (Zedner, 2021: 62). Frequently vague and imprecise, the discourse of ‘extremism’ performs several interrelated functions. First and foremost, ‘extremism’ is an inherently normative category, that serves to naturalise the managerial politics of late capitalist liberal democracies, while stigmatising worldviews outside of an increasingly narrow mainstream (Ali, 2015; Kundnani, 2014).

‘Extremism’ also conflates ideas, beliefs and values with violence. Faure-Walker (2019a) has found that in previous iterations of the UK government’s Prevent counter-extremism strategy, the terms ‘extremism’ or ‘extremist’ always appeared alongside the term ‘violent’ (p. 81). By contrast, the strategy now targets ‘extremism’ itself, ‘extending to anyone opposing an undefined “British” value system’ (Faure-Walker, 2019a: 82). Similarly, Onursal and Kirkpatrick (2021) have found that distinctions between ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism’ have become increasingly blurred within British parliamentary discourse. Such conflation is symptomatic of an often implied yet poorly evidenced premise that ‘extremist’ ideology inevitably leads to violence. In fact, the research literature fails to offer a convincing demonstration of any causal relationship between ideology and violence (Kundnani, 2012).

The increasingly wide-ranging application of the term ‘extremism’ is accompanied by the implication that all ‘extremisms’ are alike, regardless of their political content. In 2011, the UK government reviewed its counter-extremism strategy to include ‘all forms of extremism’ (McCann, 2019). Then Home Secretary, May (2015), declared that: ‘we draw no distinction between a neo-Nazi and an Islamist extremist’. The upshot of this has been a generic approach to countering ‘extremism’, largely modelled on policies developed to counter Islamist radicalism and political violence – without a clear understanding of far-right ‘extremism’ as a distinct phenomenon (McCann, 2019: ix–x). The problem is that the worldviews of radical Islamist and far-right actors are not defined by a generic opposition to ‘fundamental British values’, and that there is no one-size-fits-all political solution, counterspeech narrative or other response to ‘extremism’. To be able to genuinely challenge such misanthropic and harmful worldviews, we must understand their (sub)cultural architectures, medial environments and emotional appeals.

This issue is further complicated by the interrelationships between the state, the mainstream, and the far right. We should not accept the idea that the far right is ‘just another ideology for sale in the “marketplace of extremisms”’, but rather should recognise it as: ‘the convergence of affinities and affiliations at the periphery and centre of society’ (Fekete, 2018: 8). The blurring of boundaries between the mainstream and ‘extreme’ is evidenced by far-right street movements’ appropriation of official counter-extremist discourse. The Democratic Football Lads Alliance, a recent incarnation of the so-called ‘counter-jihad’ movement, comprised of rival football hooligan firms – has marched under the slogan ‘AGAINST ALL EXTREMISM’. Writing about the English Defence League (EDL)’s earlier, similar rhetoric, Kundnani (2014) has argued that:

it would be wrong to see the EDL’s rhetoric of antiextremism as simply a mask for more familiar forms of far Right politics. In fact, its ideology stems as much from the official antiextremist narrative of the war on terror as from the far Right tradition. According to conventional wisdom, the mobilization of far Right groups in Europe has pressured centrist politicians into adopting more xenophobic positions, leading to far Right ideas entering the mainstream. But the example of the EDL suggests the flow of ideology is more in the opposite direction. The EDL is a movement that appropriated the culturalist and reformist discourses of the official war on terror and gave them organizational form on the streets. (p. 241, emphasis added)

To summarise, then, we can say that ‘extremism’ is an unhelpfully vague term that functions: to naturalise the status quo; to conflate drastically different worldviews while ignoring their political content; and to conflate ideas with violence and terrorism. Furthermore, the notion of ‘extremism’ obscures the interrelationship, in the case of the far right, between the political periphery and the establishment.

‘Radicalisation’

Like ‘extremism’, the term ‘radicalisation’ is now widely and uncritically used by journalists, academics and laypeople. Yet the term’s ubiquity belies a discourse riddled with ambiguities (Heath-Kelly, 2013; Sedgwick, 2010). For instance, there is no academic consensus about the basic nature of ‘radicalisation’ or its relationship with political violence (Knefel, 2013; Schuurman and Taylor, 2018). The concept of ‘radicalisation’ is deeply contested even among mainstream (counter)terrorism scholars and policymakers. Yet to understand why it is more fundamentally problematic from a critical criminological perspective, it helps to understand something of the term’s renewed popularity. Prior to 2001, the term ‘radicalisation’ had been ‘used informally in academic literature to refer to a shift towards more radical politics’ (Kundnani, 2012: 7). In the aftermath of 9/11, academic and journalistic use of this term skyrocketed (Kundnani, 2012: 7). Suddenly, it ‘became very difficult to talk about the “roots of terrorism”, which some commentators claimed was an effort to excuse and justify the killing of innocent civilians’ (Neumann, 2008: 4). Within this context, ‘radicalisation’ became the preferred term of experts and officials to describe ‘what goes on before the bomb goes off’ (Neumann, 2008: 4), allowing them to emphasise the role played by the individual and, to some extent, the ideology and the group, and to significantly downplay the wider political motivations that it had become so ‘difficult’ to talk about (Sedgwick, 2010: 480). Kundnani (2012) writes that:

Answers to the question of what drives this radicalisation process are to exclude ascribing any causative role to the actions of western governments or their allies in other parts of the world; instead, individual psychological or theological journeys, largely removed from social and political circumstances, are claimed to be the ‘root cause’ of the radicalisation process. While some accounts acknowledge politics as a component of radicalisation (using euphemistic phrases, such as ‘grievances against real or perceived injustices’), this is only done in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence, before quickly moving on to the more comfortable ground of psychology or theology. (p. 5)

In this way, the new discourse of radicalisation functions to depoliticise politically motivated violence. Furthermore, in a conceptual sleight of hand, it also contributes to the depoliticisation and pathologisation of otherwise legitimate political activity, and functions to conflate such activity with terrorism. Kundnani continues:

While terrorist violence is not seen as having political causes, non-violent political activity by Muslim groups that are thought to share in the belief system of terrorists is seen as another manifestation of the same ‘radicalisation’ process, with roots in individual theological and/or psychological journeys (Kundnani, 2012: 5–6; see Younis, 2021)

This discourse also postulates a specific ontology of radicalisation. Efforts to prevent or to counter ‘radicalisation’ are oriented towards stemming ‘the circulation of ‘extremist ideas’, seen as a kind of virus, able to turn people into violent radicals’ (Kundnani, 2012: 10). The state and counter-extremists now conceive of individuals’ pathways into political violence through an ‘epidemiological imaginary’ of contagion, vulnerability and risk (Heath-Kelly, 2013, 2017; see, for example, HM Government, 2012). Cottee writes that:

Terrorism, as Prevent constructs it, isn’t a form of political activism that sentient people choose to engage in for reasons, however poorly conceived; rather, it’s an ideological contagion—a ‘disease’, . . . that afflicts the vulnerable and ‘risks’ their safety and well-being. (Cottee, 2015a)

Conceived in this way, it has become possible to speak of individual pathways into radical politics in terms of ‘vulnerability to exposure to extremism’ (Barracosa and March, 2022: 2; see also, Bouhana and Wilkstrom, 2011; Dear, 2013; See et al., 2017). At risk of stating the obvious, it bears pointing out here that contracting a transmissible disease is very different to engaging with radical politics. ‘Exposure’ to a virus or some other pathogen is something that happens to us unwittingly and incidentally, where the exact point of infection may be unknowable – it is something that we have little to no control over. This is fundamentally different from an embodied, affective, emotional, social, (sub)cultural, intellectual and, ultimately, political process of personal transformation. ‘Radicalisation’, understood in this way, denies any agency involved in the adoption of worldviews and practices labelled as ‘extreme’ (McDonald, 2020; see, for example, Coppock and McGovern, 2014). Instead, ‘radicalisation’ comes to be understood as ‘something done to’ people who are ‘vulnerable’ to ‘indoctrination or recruitment’ (McDonald, 2020: 35, emphasis in original). Such understandings, premised on outmoded ideas of ‘propaganda as a system of one-way communication’ fail to recognise the intensely social nature of processes of political transformation, which almost always take place within a social milieu or subculture (McDonald, 2020: 35; see Crone, 2016; Sageman, 2004).

In summary, the discourse of ‘radicalisation’ is beset with ambiguities, functioning to compound the discursive conflation of ‘extreme’ ideas and political violence, and often implying a linear and deterministic relationship between them. This discourse often functions to depoliticise political thought and activism (including political violence) and, through invoking an ‘epidemiological imaginary’ of contagion, obscures and denies motivations and agency for engaging in worldviews and practices labelled as ‘extreme’. Despite these issues, I continue to use the term radicalisation in the informal sense to refer to a shift towards more radical politics. Elsewhere I refer to ‘political journeys’ – a less loaded phrase and one used by contemporary far-right supporters and activists themselves to describe their conversion to a far-right worldview.

‘Terrorism’

As with ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’, the notion of terrorism is beset by definitional and normative issues (Ganor, 2002; Schmid, 2004). The concept has long evaded a widely agreed upon definition among academics, and as critical terrorism scholars have pointed out, terrorism is also a social and cultural construct (Jackson, 2011). I want to argue here that terrorism is a largely unhelpful lens through which to view the contemporary far right for at least two reasons. First, counter-extremism’s myopic focus on terrorism as the inevitable end point of radicalisation functions to obfuscate other harms. Terrorism and hate crime are examples of what Žižek (2008) terms ‘subjective’ violence: that which is performed by a clearly identifiable agent (p. 1). However, Žižek exhorts us to step back from the spectacle of subjective violence in order that we can ‘perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts’ (Žižek, 2008). This generative background assumes two forms: symbolic violence (racism, hate speech, discrimination), and systemic violence (the ‘catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems’) (Žižek, 2008: 2).

It is relatively rare that far-right supporters or activists perpetrate hate crimes – rarer still that they are motivated to commit acts of mass murder. Nevertheless, the far right is continually engaged in producing and sustaining myriad other symbolic and systemic forms of harm. For instance, seeding far-right ideas, narratives and talking points in public discourse – such as racialised tropes of non-European asylum seekers as jihadists or sexual predators – functions to raise the level of ambient prejudice in society. In this way the deliberate and strategic ‘metapolitical’ interventions of the organised far right coalesce with everyday casual bigotry as well as the use of dehumanising language by the press and the political establishment, contributing to a political and cultural climate in which minority groups are vilified, and paving the way for the legislative erosion of their human rights. Viewing the threat posed by the far right solely in terms of the subjective violence of terrorism and hate crime obscures such harms.

None of this is to minimise the threat or horror of far-right political violence. Yet when we turn to consider far-right terrorism proper, the established conceptual framework of so-called ‘lone wolf’ terrorism is also found wanting, and functions to obscure the social, symbolic and (sub)cultural connectedness of the contemporary far right. Most recent high-profile far-right terrorist attacks have been perpetrated by single actors and described as instances of ‘lone wolf’ terrorism (see, for example, Gardell, 2021; Hartleb, 2020). Per Hamm and Spaaij (2017), ‘lone wolf terrorism’ refers to ‘terrorist actions carried out by lone individuals. . . “a person who acts on his or her own without orders from — or even connections to — an organization”’ (p. 5). In today’s era of livestreamed terrorism, in which supporters encourage and celebrate mass murder in real time, and in which perpetrators take influence and inspiration from each other, referencing prior atrocities in digitally circulated screeds – while also seeking to inspire others to follow in their footsteps – the notion that ‘lone wolves’ act alone merits problematisation. While perhaps not members of any formal organisation, these individuals are immersed in a shared ‘cultural architecture of. . . propaganda and motivation’ (Sunde et al., 2021: 272). As Nilsson (2022) notes, although these self-proclaimed ‘ethno-soldiers’ have ‘acted on different continents, they share the same symbolical universe’ (p. 1, emphasis added).

Although ‘lone wolf’ is a misnomer, it is also inaccurate to describe most instances of single-actor far-right terrorism as the product of terroristic networks. The contemporary far right is not primarily geared towards the production of political violence, and its networks are not oriented towards offering logistical support for terrorist attacks (although cf. Katz, 2022; Miller, 2022, on the recent emergence of the ‘Terrorgram’ network). For Berntzen and Sandberg (2014), it is important that we recognise lone-actor terrorists as emerging from broader social movements. Focussing on Anders Breivik’s use of rhetoric and narratives drawn from the wider anti-Islamic movement in Norway, they conclude that:

the metaphor of lone wolves does not reflect a sufficient understanding of the social character of the language and political narrative involved in acts of lone wolf terrorism. Although Breivik operated alone, his ideology, world-view, and narratives emerged from a. . . social movement. (Berntzen and Sandberg, 2014: 772)

It is striking that Berntzen and Sandberg are writing before the ‘algorithmic rise’ of the alt-right (Daniels, 2018) and the current ongoing wave of chan-inspired mass shootings.³ At the time of Breivik’s attacks in 2011, social media platforms and their recommendation algorithms were undeveloped, and the online far right was largely contained to Stormfront and other message boards (see, for example, Bowman-Grieve, 2009; Perry and Olsson, 2009). The contemporary far-right online subculture – and the techno-social ecosystem that facilitates its ongoing reproduction and occasional violent eruptions into the offline world – remained in its infancy. The implications of such technological developments are explored below. For now, two related concepts are worth considering: stochastic terrorism and scripted violence.

‘Stochastic terrorism’, in its most popular formulation, refers to ‘the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable’ (G2geek, 2011, emphasis in original).⁴ This is what happens when the use of inflammatory rhetoric by jihadist groups or American right-wing talk show hosts indirectly motivates individuals to violence (G2geek, 2011). Crucially, ‘The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official is not the stochastic terrorist’; rather, ‘they are the “missile” set in motion by the stochastic terrorist. The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media as their means of setting those “missiles” in motion’ (G2geek, 2011). Furthermore, when people are motivated to violence by their rhetoric ‘[t]he stochastic terrorist has plausible deniability’ (G2geek, 2011). Indeed, the stochastic terrorist may not intend to incite violence but rather may do so out of negligence (G2geek, 2011). First popularised outside of academia, the concept of stochastic terrorism has now begun to be used more rigorously by scholars (Amman and Meloy, 2021, 2024; Hamm and Spaaij, 2017; Kemper, 2022), although some commentators continue to use the term imprecisely and others have criticised the idea (Cottee, 2022; Kemper, 2022).

The concept of ‘scripted violence’ refers to ‘coded’ forms of ‘rhetorical incitement’ (Berlet, 2014: 304). Berlet writes that:

The leaders of political or social movements sometimes tell their followers that a specific group of ‘Others’ is plotting to destroy civilized society. History tells us that if this message is repeated vividly enough, loudly enough, often enough and long enough – it is only a matter of time before the bodies. . . start to turn up’. (Berlet, 2014: 304)

Crucially, leaders ‘need not directly exhort violence to create a constituency that hears a call to take action against the named enemy’ (Berlet, 2014: 304). Scripted violence is what takes place when a political leader or influencer ‘identifies a problem, repeatedly uses inflammatory and dehumanising language, and emphasises the absence of a conventional political solution. They rarely, if ever, tell their followers to commit acts of violence; however, their messages are read as such’ (Moore and Roberts, 2021: 174).

The notion of scripted violence seems particularly appropriate to describe the apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the major animating narrative of the contemporary ethnonationalist far right: the so-called ‘Great Replacement’ or ‘White Genocide’ conspiracy theory. This is the idea that ethnically homogeneous populations in European nations are being ‘replaced’ by people of non-European origin – and that this is being deliberately orchestrated by liberal, left-wing or Jewish elites (see Ekman, 2022; Moses, 2019). Moses (2019) notes how the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings – who published a 74-page document entitled ‘The Great Replacement’ immediately prior to his attack – portrayed his murder of 51 people not as an act ‘of aggression but, as he writes, “a partisan action against an occupying force”’ (p. 203). The man who murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, also motivated by the ‘White Genocide’ conspiracy theory, framed his actions in similar terms, writing: ‘I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered’ (US Department of Justice, 2019). Apocalyptic narratives can promote violence by enabling perpetrators to justify their actions as acts of ‘preventative self-defence’ (Moses, 2019: 203; see, Presser, 2012; Presser and Sandberg, 2015; Smith, 2005). Here again we encounter the interrelationship between the ‘extreme’ and the mainstream. As Moses notes, while these ideas seem marginal when ‘garbed as neo-Nazi conspiracy theories’, the narrative that ‘Europe is being swamped by Third World migrants, and especially by Muslims, is mainstream discourse’ (Moses, 2019: 211; see for example, Murray, 2017).

Scripted and stochastic terror do not necessarily describe different aetiologies of violence but rather different aspects of the same phenomenon: scripted violence is stochastic in nature. Berlet (2014) writes that while social science has shown that demonisation and scapegoating can and does foment violence, it ‘cannot. . . predict which individual upon hearing the rhetoric of clear or coded incitement’ will act upon it (p. 304). Similarly for Moses:

Those advancing an alarmist ‘decline of the West’ narrative. . . are intellectually equipping those with catastrophized subjectivities to take their proclaimed state of emergency as a green light for desperate measures. If you postulate a cultural and/or demographic ‘war’, we now know all too well that some will take your words literally and arrogate to themselves the role of your words’ executor: it only takes one or two. (Moses, 2019: 212)

To summarise, a focus on terrorism functions to obscure the myriad other harms produced and perpetuated by the far right. Furthermore, ‘lone wolf’ terrorism is a misnomer, since perpetrators of lone-actor far-right political violence emerge from a shared subcultural architecture of motivation: taking influence and inspiration from other ‘ethno-soldiers’ as well as the broader far right, and seeking to inspire others through their actions. The concepts of stochastic terrorism and scripted violence gesture towards the distributed nature of agency and responsibility in relation to contemporary far right-inspired political violence. The picture is further complicated when we consider how the contemporary far right and its harms are constituted through a complex digital ecosystem of networked and ‘weaponized affect’ (Ganesh, 2020: 893) – which the second part of this article seeks to address.

Cultural criminology and the contemporary far right

So far, this article has problematised three key concepts from the lexicon of counter-extremism. An alternative framework, one that can usefully inform our understanding of the contemporary far right, and the media environments, beliefs, values and emotions that sustain and reproduce it – and which occasionally motivate its adherents to murderous violence – can be found in cultural criminology (see Ferrell et al., 2004, 2008; Ilan, 2019). Cultural criminology is an approach that ‘emphasizes the role of image, style, representation and meaning’ in crime, deviance and social control (Ferrell, 2013: 110).⁵ Cultural criminology is uniquely suited to apprehending the contemporary far right owing to its focus on subculture and style, its attendance to networked digital media and its foregrounding of emotion and affect. The remainder of this article considers each of these three areas in turn and how they pertain to the contemporary far right and associated harms.

Subculture and style

An emerging body of literature from within and adjacent to cultural criminology has argued that recent formations of jihadism in the West should be understood as a subculture (Jensen et al., 2022; see, for example, Conti, 2017; Cottee, 2011, 2020; Hemmingsen, 2015; Sunde et al., 2021). Jensen et al., for example, note that a subcu ltural perspective:

opens up for understanding Western jihadism as a. . . response to the. . . experience of racial and Islamophobic othering and renders jihadism intelligible as opposed to a mere irrational manifestation of evil grounded in religious fanaticism. Subcultural analysis also allows a grasp of the aesthetic fascination and cultural pull-factor of jihadism and can be helpful for understanding the styles and symbolic repertoires of Western jihadi subcultures. (Jensen et al., 2021: 431)

Hemmingsen has argued that also understanding jihadism as a subculture can usefully compliment other perspectives. ‘In addition to being a political project, a religious interpretation and something justifying the use of violence’, jihadism, ‘is a social phenomenon, an identity, a subculture, a rebellion against restricting traditions and norms, and much more’ (Hemmingsen, 2015: 3).

Other commentators including cultural criminologists have discussed the far right as a subculture (see Cottee, 2021; Hamm, 1994, 2004; Larsen and Jensen, 2023; Pisoiu, 2015), and I want to argue that the contemporary far right can be productively understood as such. As with Western jihadism, an analysis of the contemporary far right as a subculture, rather than as an irrational manifestation of ‘hatred’ allows for a clearer understanding of its appeal. Certainly, all the distinctive features of a deviant subculture are present: a value system and shared internal beliefs distinct from that of mainstream culture; a specialised vocabulary; and a shared subcultural style (Muncie, 2001: 296).⁶ Let us consider these elements in turn.

Beliefs and values different from that of mainstream culture

The contemporary far right shares a set of internal beliefs. Most obviously there are the beliefs in the biological reality and supremacy of ‘the white race’, and the cultural superiority of ‘Western civilisation’. Other shared beliefs include a revisionist version of history and a conspiratorial, embattled and apocalyptic worldview (see Moses, 2019; Nilsson, 2022). The far right’s values – white supremacy, masculinity, social conservatism, nationalism, militarism – also differ from the mainstream, at least in their emphasis and openness. However, following Cottee (2020), it may be more accurate to say that rather than radically opposed to the concerns of conventional society, such values represent ‘shadow undercurrents that co-exist within the cosmopolitan liberal order’ (p. 775).

A specialised vocabulary

The contemporary far right is steeped in a shared communicative repertoire comprising a distinct subcultural argot, as well as symbols, images, recurring jokes and obscure subcultural references new and old (see Salazar, 2018). This subcultural cryptography has been developed, at least in part, to provide a camouflage of incoherence, irony and plausible deniability, enabling far-right activists to avoid social censure and algorithmic censorship while espousing their worldviews online (social media platforms issue bans for the use of overt racial slurs, but rarely for their cryptic euphemisms) (see, for instance, Greene, 2019; Kennedy, 2022). Jewish people are ‘blues’, ‘you-know-whos’ or denoted by (((triple parentheses))) around their names. Other fascists and white supremacists are ‘red pilled’, ‘based’ or ‘/our guys/’, whereas their political enemies – depicted as mindless and emasculated consumer drones – are ‘bugmen’ or ‘NPCs’ (non-playable characters – automatons). The contemporary far right’s ability to produce strange new words in a relentless, ‘frenetic churn of slurs [and] in-jokes’ is such that terms like ‘red pilled’ (meaning the ability or willingness to see the world as it really is) have percolated into the mainstream (Lewis, 2020; Tiffany, 2021). Whereas counter-extremists see this vocabulary simply as a cipher to be decoded and rendered legible, a cultural criminological perspective would recognise the performative nature of this argot and the ‘sneaky thrills’ shared by its speakers in exchanging secret or dangerous knowledge that can only be imparted through clandestine means (Katz, 1988).

A shared subcultural style

While the boots, braces and bomber jacket ‘skinhead’ style so often associated with the far right (Hamm, 1994; Turner-Graham, 2015) is today largely absent, many of the contemporary far right’s adherents nevertheless have specialised ways of dressing. The half skull mask is now synonymous with terroristic ‘accelerationist’ fascist groups (Hatewatch, 2017; Hummel, 2021). Meanwhile, the ‘high-and-tight’ or undercut hair style, popular in 1930s Germany, along with ‘preppy’ khakis and polo shirts – both sported by American white nationalist and alt-right figurehead, Richard Spencer – has been hailed as ‘the new uniform of white supremacism’ as a new generation of racists tried to eschew the militaristic style and symbolic baggage of white power skinheads and the militia movement (Hesse and Zak, 2016; Williams, 2011). The far right continues to engage in bricolage, appropriating and reconfiguring the meaning of existing styles (Hebdige, 1979; see Hamm, 1994). Perhaps most well-known here is the adoption by US-based fascist street gang, the Proud Boys, of black and yellow Fred Perry polo shirts (see Strübel and Sklar, 2022). Today, the contemporary far right’s subcultural style and bricolage encompasses music, artwork, propaganda, online avatars and memes as well as fashion. Across this cultural ecology, the contemporary far right displays a repertoire of distinctive styles – borrowing extensively from internet culture, historic far-right imagery and iconography from around the world, as well as new hybrid aesthetics such as ‘fashwave’ that remix existing symbols and styles, ascribing them alternative coded meanings (Larsen and Jensen, 2023).

Understanding the contemporary far right as a subculture can help us make sense of some of the ‘dimensions that draw people toward these milieus’, beyond their explicit politics (Larsen and Jensen, 2023: 5). Such dimensions include: the seductive appeal of subcultures – excitement, ‘cool’, fame; their emotionality; and their role in creating a sense of collective identity (Hamm, 2004; Larsen and Jensen, 2023; Sunde et al., 2021). Furthermore, if the contemporary far right constitutes a subculture, it follows that ‘radicalisation’ towards it – so often conceived of in terms of vulnerability, risk and contagion – is better understood as enculturation (see Holt et al., 2017): the process of learning and adopting the worldview, values, norms, customs, argot and so on of a given (sub)culture.⁷ We are dealing here with a process of profound personal transformation. For Munn, writing on individuals’ online journeys into the alt-right, this transformation ‘occurs at the micro-level of the individual. . . a slow colonization of the self, a steady infiltration of heart and mind’ (2019). This process, Munn argues, recalls Foucault’s writing on power as something that ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives’ (Foucault, 1980: 39). Accordingly, we might jettison counter-extremists’ bizarrely abstract and clinical language of ‘risk factors’ and ‘recruitment’, and epidemic metaphors of ‘exposure’, in favour of a cultural criminological framework and conceptual language that tends to the subjective, affective, emotional, embodied, communicative, symbolic and political dimensions of social life. In describing ‘radicalisation’ as a process of ‘world-building’, McDonald points the way:

[R]adicalisation is not an experience of manipulation or recruitment. . . Rather it is a form of practice or agency best understood as world-building. As such, radicalisation needs to be understood as an inherently political endeavour, a form of political action. . . The closer we get to actual experiences of radicalisation the more clearly we see the extent to which this involves embodied, communicative subjectivity, where actors produce and are sustained by an ‘affective fabric’ that is increasingly evident in digital sociality. (McDonald, 2020: 47, emphasis in original)

Today, this process of intimate personal transformation cannot be understood outside or apart from the networked ‘medial environments’ in which far-right subcultures are inextricably enmeshed (see Munn, 2020).

Networked digital media

By far the most well-known conceptual model regarding the role of the internet in radicalisation – long suggested by counter-extremist organisations, academics and policymakers, as well as the popular news media – posits the existence of a ‘radicalisation pipeline’ or ‘rabbit hole’ on YouTube (Ribeiro et al., 2020; see for example, HM Government, 2019; Lewis, 2018; Munn, 2019; O’Callaghan et al., 2015; Roose, 2019; Tufekci, 2018). The ‘pipeline’ thesis holds that YouTube’s personalised recommendation algorithm incrementally nudges users towards viewing more radical content. Tufekci (2018), notes how YouTube appears to recommend more and more radical content regardless of topic. The likely explanation, she concludes:

has to do with the nexus of artificial intelligence and Google’s business model. (YouTube is owned by Google.) For all its lofty rhetoric, Google is an advertising broker, selling our attention to companies that will pay for it. The longer people stay on YouTube, the more money Google makes. . . [YouTube’s] algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with — or to incendiary content in general.

This is an inherently difficult claim to assess, since YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is ‘black boxed’ – its complexity and technical opacity functions to obfuscate its inner workings – and can therefore only be indirectly probed by analysing its inputs and outputs (Diakopolous, 2014; see Pasquale, 2015). Until recently, there was little substantial evidence to support this thesis; however, several recent studies have produced damning conclusions (see Yesilada and Lewandowsky, 2022, for a review). In an analysis of over 330,000 YouTube videos and over 72 million user comments, Ribeiro et al. (2020) found that ‘users consistently migrate from milder to more extreme content’ (p. 131). Whittaker et al. (2021: 2) found that YouTube ‘does promote extreme content after interacting with far-right materials’. What is more, far-right activists’ self-narratives of their own political journeys often cite the importance of YouTube (Evans, 2018).

That recommendation algorithms on YouTube, and likely other platforms, appear to funnel receptive audiences towards far-right content should be cause for alarm. However, the ‘pipeline’ thesis is clearly an oversimplification, implying a linear and deterministic relationship between media consumption and political beliefs, denying any sense of agency to internet users. Furthermore, commentary on online ‘radicalisation’ has tended to focus on these algorithmic ‘persuasion architectures’ (Tufekci, 2017) to the neglect of a more holistic understanding of far-right social media networks.

A cultural criminological perspective is well placed to remedy such shortcomings. First, a cultural criminological approach can draw attention to the complexity of far-right online spaces and the social networks they cultivate. Cultural criminologists have drawn on the insights of the ‘spatial turn’ in social theory to develop sophisticated analyses of an array of spaces and their interrelationships with crime, deviance and harm (Campbell, 2012). Hayward (2012) has suggested that this same sensibility should be brought to bear by cultural criminologists studying online spaces. If the far-right internet does not assume the form of a linear, unidirectional pipeline, rabbit hole, or funnel, with correspondingly straightforward effects on visitors’ political beliefs, what other conceptual models might prove useful? Baele et al.’s conceptualisation of the far-right internet as an ecosystem is instructive here. For Baele et al. (2023), the far-right internet is ‘dynamic and multidimensional. . . made of an ever-changing number of different components whose natures and interconnections are in constant evolution’ (p. 2). To this we might add that online spaces have a topography: an uneven terrain of websites, platforms, servers and apps that serve different purposes, host different kinds of media and interactions, and are more-or-less inward or outward facing, more-or-less hostile or accommodating of far-right speech, and more-or-less secure from the prying eyes of law enforcement, journalists and anti-fascist activists.

Yet a further dimension of complexity is introduced when we consider the diverse online-offline interplay of far-right ideas and practices (Baele et al., 2023: 2; see Fielitz and Thurston, 2019). From strategically coordinated social media campaigns intended to shift the ‘Overton window’ of acceptable mainstream discourse (see Heikkilä, 2017; Tuters and Hagen, 2020) to invite-only Telegram and Discord chats used to arrange furtive fascist meetups, and from carefully choreographed publicity stunts captured on video for an online audience to livestreamed street clashes and mass shootings – ‘the street scripts the screen and the screen scripts the street; there is no clearly linear sequence, but rather a shifting interplay between the real and the virtual, the factual and the fictional’ (Ferrell et al., 2008: 123–124). Online spaces have been shown in some circumstances to catalyse and strengthen real-world far-right organising, networking and activism (see for example, Europol, 2020). Elsewhere, it has been suggested that online fora may serve a cathartic function, allowing activists to vent their frustrations and subsuming otherwise potentially violent tendencies (Awan, 2007; Cottee, 2020). Drawing on cultural criminology, Castle and Parsons (2019) have already explored the complex interrelationship between the online presence and real-world activity of far-right vigilante group Soldiers of Odin Norge.

Second, a cultural criminological approach can draw attention to the lived experience of participation in online subcultures. Cultural criminologists have examined the online presence of incel (Andersen, 2023; Cottee, 2021), jihadist (Jensen et al., 2022; Sunde et al., 2021) and pro-anorexia subcultures (Gailey, 2009). They have described these subcultures’ online lifeworlds, the beliefs, values and emotions that animate them (Cottee, 2021), and how online media help to ‘cement a common identity and affective solidarity’ through the construction of a distinct subcultural styles (Sunde et al., 2021: 13; see Andersen, 2023). These insights show that contrary to popular conceptions of radicalisation, individuals are not ‘groomed’ in isolation by ‘hate preachers’, ‘radicalisers’ or ‘extremist influencers’ (Crone, 2016; see, for example, Home Office, 2015). Rather, radicalisation towards, and the maintenance of, a far-right worldview is an intensely social phenomenon (Crone, 2016). The far-right online ecosystem is also an online community: where activists hang out and make friends; watch and comment on livestreams in real time; exchange jokes, memes and gossip; share in each other’s rage, fears and anxieties; provide emotional support; cheer on each other’s activism; and strategise how best to ‘red pill’ family members and colleagues. Accordingly, a cultural criminological approach would recognise that the ecosystem described by Baele et al. (2023) is also a ‘subjective, affective, embodied, aesthetic, material, performative, textual, symbolic and visual’ landscape (Campbell, 2012: 401). Further work remains to be done to investigate the extent to which the two areas described above – algorithmic persuasion architectures and their affordances, and the social and emotional dimensions of online subcultural communities – interact with and modulate one another.⁸

In summary, cultural criminology, with its attendance to networked digital media is uniquely well suited to investigate online spaces and their role in reproducing online subcultures. Rather than a linear and deterministic ‘pipeline’ of radicalisation, existing cultural criminological research suggests we might better understand the far-right internet as a complex, multidimensional and dynamic ecosystem, which sustains and animates an online community, and has wide-ranging implications for real-world activism and organising. It is to the emotions and affects that are produced and circulated in and through this online world that we now turn.

Emotions and weaponised affect

Mainstream journalistic, scholarly and policy discussion has tended overwhelmingly to emphasise the role of hatred as the animating sentiment behind the far right to the extent that ‘hate’ has become a reductive metonym for far-right groups and their worldview (see, for example, Collins, 2011; Hope Not Hate, 2022). Meanwhile, NGOs and policymakers lobby the government to designate speech as ‘hateful extremism’ and far-right organisations as ‘hate groups’ (Commission for Countering Extremism, 2021; Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 2019). For its part, criminological research has tended to view the far right through the narrow lens of ‘hate crime’ (Jacobs and Potter, 1997; Jenness, 2001). Yet conceiving of the lifeworld of far-right activists and organisers solely in these terms only serves to flatten what is, in actuality, a far more complex, nuanced and heterogeneous emotional universe. Hatred is clearly present here, along with its cousins – anger, fear, resentment and disgust (towards racialised Others, as well as women, gender non-conforming people and non-normative sexual relationships) (Moore and Roberts, 2021). Yet many other feelings are also prominent, including the ontological insecurity and alienation of life under consumer capitalism (Kinnvall, 2019) as well as shame, (failed) masculinity and virility, inadequacy and (racialised) sexual anxieties (Moore and Roberts, 2021; see Cottee, 2021; Theweleit, 1987). Several commentators have argued that we should also look beyond ‘negative’ emotions to consider, for example, feelings of nostalgia, pride, community, solidarity and ‘brotherhood’, hope, enthusiasm and compassion (Cottee and Hayward, 2011; Doroshenko and Tu, 2023; Leser and Spissinger, 2020).

Ethnographies of the far right have highlighted the importance of emotionality (Blee, 2007; see, for example, Virchow, 2007). Recent research has also examined the interrelationship between emotions and new media ecosystems within the far right (see Kisic Merino and Kinnvall, 2023; Marcks and Pawelz, 2022). Meanwhile, cultural criminology has long sought to capture the phenomenology of crime and deviance: their lived experience, symbolic meaning and emotional intensity, their embodied and affective dimensions, as well as the interweaving of transgression, emotion and identity (Ferrell et al., 2008; see, for example, Lyng, 1990, 2004). Of particular relevance to the present discussion, cultural criminologists have explored the emotional motivations and existential attractions of political violence (Cottee, 2021; Cottee and Hayward, 2011). Cottee and Hayward hypothesise that political violence may be motivated by a desire for excitement, meaning and glory, concluding that:

Terrorism. . . offers a solution, however partial and ultimately self-destructive, to subjective feelings of existential frustration. What is meant here by ‘existential frustration’ is radical dissatisfaction regarding one’s moral existence in the world – an emotional state marked by the feeling that one’s life is meaningless, directionless, boring, banal, uneventful, anodyne, soulless, aimless, passive, cowardly. Terrorist organizations. . . not only furnish their members with an all-embracing cause and bonds of great intimacy and solidarity; they also open up a world of exhilarating action, violence, intrigue and drama. (Cottee and Hayward, 2011: 978–979, emphasis in original)

More recently, Cottee (2021) has probed the miasma of negative emotions that animate the (online) incel subculture and, occasionally, inspire acts of violent revenge. The incel subculture, for Cottee (2021), is one ‘unrestrained in its emotionality’, and which is characterised by ‘chronic existential misery. . . total abjection and abasement. . . relentless torment and neverending trauma’ caused by ‘sexual frustration and loneliness’ (pp. 99, 97). Indeed, for the young men who comprise this subculture, sexual frustration and the resulting shame, resentment towards and hatred of women that together define their ‘inceldom’ come to represent a master status – the primary source of their identity (Cottee, 2021; see Merton, 1968).

For the purposes of the present article, Sunde et al.’s (2021) analysis of online magazines produced by Al Qaeda and Islamic State is perhaps the most instructive writing from a cultural criminological perspective to date. For Sunde et al. (2021), jihadists’ journeys towards radicalism and political violence cannot be fully understood apart from a ‘complex cultural architecture of. . . propaganda and motivation’ (p. 272). Through a close reading of jihadist e-magazines – one part of ‘a wider [online] ecology of communication and propaganda’ – the authors trace the entanglement of subcultural style, emotional experience, identity and politics (Sunde et al., 2021: 281). In particular, the authors point to three prominent themes within the propaganda material they analyse, which they argue ‘may appeal particularly to socio-economic excluded youths. . . who perceive themselves to be in a hopeless situation of continuous marginalization and stigmatization’ (Sunde et al., 2021: 283). First, the propaganda magazines analysed emphasise the importance of brotherhood, rituals, and belonging, focussing ‘on in-group feelings of warmth, togetherness, and solidarity’ (Sunde et al., 2021: 276). In doing so these productions frame participation in violent jihad as a ‘defense of one’s fictive kin’ and a means of accessing these affirmative sensations (Sunde et al., 2021: 277, 278). Second, jihadist subcultural media conjure and celebrate ‘jihadi cool’ (Cottee, 2015b) through their depiction of the masculine, militaristic subcultural style of the mujahideen, who embody the persona of the ‘badass’ (Katz, 1988). Importantly, the jihadi lifestyle is ‘presented as well within the reach of readers’: the message to aspiring mujahideen is that ‘violent acts are a route for individuals to obtain recognition and status. . . as cool, rebellious heroes’ (Sunde et al., 2021: 279). Third, the e-magazines reviewed frame terroristic violence and murder as transgressive, exciting, intense, self-affirming, emotionally satisfying and pleasurable experiences. In doing so, they emphasise the seductive appeal of jihadism as a form of ‘edgework’: ‘an attempt to achieve a semblance of control within ontologically insecure social worlds’ through extreme forms of voluntary risk-taking (Hayward, 2002: 86; Lyng, 1990, 2004).

Clearly, individuals’ journeys into these radical milieus are processes of immense emotional depth. While a cultural criminological approach can help us make sense of the contemporary far right as a subculture, as well as its interrelationship with and reproduction through a new media ecosystem – it is in foregrounding the role of emotions, experience and identity in motivating participation in deviant subcultures, crime and harm, where cultural criminology already has much to offer. Recent cultural criminological work in this area can be further developed by drawing on the insights of cultural, media and communication studies. Scholars from a range of disciplines have begun to theorise the mediation of emotions and sensations through new forms of digital communication in terms of networked affect (Hillis et al., 2015). The key idea here is that networked online media and communications:

are not merely about storing and sharing data but also about the spread. . . amplification and dissipation of affective intensities [. . .] As the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected by one another. . . affect cuts across, and joins together, bodies human and nonhuman, organic and machine, material and conceptual. . . These include individual users, more or less emergent collective bodies, human and non-human and thus also devices, platforms, applications, interfaces, companies, files and threads. (Paasonen, 2018: 283)

Data scientists employed by Facebook have demonstrated ‘massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks’, showing that ‘emotional states can be transferred to others’ via social media, ‘leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness’ (Kramer et al., 2014: 8788). It is this contagion and modulation of emotions, sensations and intensities that the idea of networked affect seeks to explain.

Some scholars have already begun to utilise ideas of networked affect in theorising the contemporary far right. For instance, Ganesh (2020) describes how online far-right influencers make use of the ‘participatory culture of immaterial digital labour that platforms built around user-generated content’ encourage, to generate and channel what he terms ‘white thymos’ (p. 900). ‘White thymos’ refers to a complex of racialised pride, rage, resentment and anger generated by ‘informational and affective circuits that create the perception of a loss of white entitlement’ (Ganesh, 2020: 894). White thymos, Ganesh argues, is actively synthesised – cultivated – both by key influencers in the far-right online ecosystem and through the participatory culture that they help construct, using several strategies, including documenting instances of purported white victimisation (Ganesh, 2020: 899). Once cultivated, white-thymotic rage can be channelled and weaponised by far-right influencers to advance their personal brands and political agendas through coordinated ‘raids’ to boost specific narratives or through targeted harassment campaigns against their political enemies (see Massanari, 2017).

Conclusion

The 21st Century will be defined by overlapping and escalating environmental, economic and social crises, providing fertile ground for a resurgent far right. It is crucial that we develop the analytical tools necessary to understand the far right’s transformation and adaptation, and to challenge and disrupt its growth. Mainstream analysis of the contemporary far right, viewed through the lens of counter-extremism and premised on a series of imprecise, ambiguous and normative concepts is abstract, superficial and uncritical. The project of counter-extremism is tethered to the maintenance of the neoliberal status quo (Boukalas, 2019; Skoczylis and Andrews, 2020) at a time when what is needed is principled opposition to racism and fascism, and an openness to genuinely radical political alternatives (Kundnani, 2014).

This article has brought together existing criminological scholarship, as well as contributions from adjacent disciplines to show how a cultural criminological approach can offer novel insights and better inform our understanding of the contemporary far right. After briefly introducing the contemporary far right and counter-extremism, the article problematised the concepts of ‘extremism’, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘terrorism’. ‘Extremism’ as a concept functions to naturalise the status quo while ignoring the interrelationship between the mainstream and the far right. The term conflates different non-liberal worldviews and equates ideas with violence. The discourse of ‘radicalisation’ further compounds this conflation of ideas and violence, and functions to depoliticise and pathologise non-liberal political thought and activism (including political violence). In doing so, it allows policymakers to sidestep awkward discussions about the political motivations of so-called ‘extremists’. A focus on terrorism (a rare occurrence) obscures other commonplace and systemic harms associated with the far right. ‘Lone wolf’ terrorism is a misnomer since lone-actor terrorists emerge from a shared subcultural milieu. The concepts of stochastic terrorism and scripted violence, which gesture towards the distributed nature of agency in producing contemporary far-right political violence, may prove insightful.

Cultural criminology is uniquely well placed to furnish insights into the contemporary far right owing to its focus on subculture and style, its attendance to networked digital media and its foregrounding of emotion and affect. Cultural criminologists have long studied deviant subcultures. An understanding of the contemporary far right as a subculture can usefully compliment other perspectives, permitting an appreciation of its social, stylistic and symbolic appeals. Cultural criminology’s attendance to social and networked media can aid us in understanding the contemporary far-right subculture as one sustained and animated by a complex, multidimensional online ecosystem. Finally, cultural criminology’s concern with lived experience, emotion and affect can help us understand the contemporary far right’s emotional and existential attractions.

In concluding this article, it is worth outlining several productive directions – a tentative programme – for future cultural criminological research on the contemporary far right. First, there is the ongoing task of monitoring and mapping the shifting subcultural terrain of the contemporary far right – both its offline presence, its online ecosystem(s) and the changing strategies, tactics, dynamics and interrelationships therein. Who are the key influencers, what are the main organisations or factions, where and how are they mobilising, and what does this mean for the wider movement? The interrelationship between online and offline organisation, ideas, practices and narratives also merits further investigation – particularly as it relates to specific socio-political issues, national and regional contexts, and their constituencies.

Second, cultural criminologists should examine individuals’ pathways into far-right politics. Routes into the far right have changed. No longer are supporters recruited into an organisation – instead, many are ‘incrementally nudged along. . . medial pathway[s]’ online, from reactionary videos on YouTube to overtly racist, misogynistic and violent content on fringe platforms (Munn, 2019). A popular topic of discussion in far-right online spaces is supporters’ personal recounting of their ‘political journeys’ – offering a rich seam of data for analysis. The subfield of narrative criminology is particularly well suited to make sense of such accounts.

Third, central to the ascendance of the contemporary far right has been a narrative of ‘White Genocide’ or the ‘Great Replacement’ – the alleged ongoing replacement of whites, orchestrated by left-wing elites and/or Jews. This narrative has directly inspired multiple mass shootings around the world (Nilsson, 2022) and is simultaneously creeping into mainstream discourse (Ekman, 2022). Cultural criminologists would do well to interrogate the articulation, strategic dissemination, and emotional and affective appeal of ‘Great Replacement’ theory and other animating narratives of the far right. Here again, a narrative criminological framework seems relevant – since, as Presser (2009) notes, ‘[a]ggregates as well as individuals tell, and act on the basis of, stories’ (p. 178).

Fourth, cultural criminologists have long interrogated (sub)cultural productions including music, film, television, comics and video games. The contemporary far right has become adept at cranking out its own cultural productions that blur the line between propaganda and entertainment, including revisionist historical documentaries (Žižek, 2018), fiction and nonfiction books and publishing houses, music (Larsen and Jensen, 2023), artwork and videogames (Condis, 2021) – as well as engaging in its own literary and cultural criticism, publishing review essays of films and music from a far-right perspective. Cultural criminology is uniquely positioned to be able to critically interrogate these (sub)cultural products and furnish students of the contemporary far right with a range of insights.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Tony Karas

Notes

Author biography

Tony Karas is a Criminologist whose research examines the far right. Tony’s work employs a cultural criminological approach as an alternative to ‘counter-extremist’ thinking about the contemporary far right, and focuses on the roles of subculture and style, the internet and social media, and emotion and affect. His most recent research analyses British neo-Nazis’ first-hand accounts of their political journeys into the far right.

References

Ali

(2015) The Extreme Centre: A Warning. Verso.

Allchorn

(2021) Towards a Truly Post-Organisational UK Far Right? The Usefulness of a Newly Emergent Concept. GNET. Available at: https://gnet-research.org/2021/12/16/towards-a-truly-post-organisational-uk-far-right-the-usefulness-of-a-newly-emergent-concept/ (accessed 23 January 2023).

Amman

Meloy

(2021) Stochastic terrorism: A linguistic and psychological analysis. Perspectives on Terrorism 15(5): 2–13.

Amman

Meloy

(2024) Incitement to violence and stochastic terrorism: Legal, academic, and practical parameters for researchers and investigators. Terrorism and Political Violence 36(2): 234–245.

Andersen

(2023) The symbolic boundary work of incels: Subcultural negotiation of meaning and identity online. Deviant Behavior 44(7): 1081–1101.

Awan

(2007) Radicalization on the internet? The virtual propagation of jihadist media and its effects. RUSI Journal 152(3): 76–81.

Baele

Brace

Coan

(2021) Variations on a theme? Comparing 4chan, 8kun, and other chans’ far-right “/pol” boards. Perspectives on Terrorism 15(1): 65–80.

Baele

Brace

Coan

(2023) Uncovering the far-right online ecosystem: An analytical framework and research agenda. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 46(9): 1599–1623.

Barracosa

March

(2022) Dealing with radicalised youth offenders: The development and implementation of a youth-specific framework. Frontiers in Psychiatry 12. Available at: https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.773545 (accessed 9 June 2022).

10.

Becker

(1963) Outsiders. Free Press.

11.

Bennett

(2011) The post-subcultural turn: Some reflections 10 years on. Journal of Youth Studies 14(5): 493–506.

12.

Bennett

Kahn-Harris

(eds) (2004) After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture. Palgrave Macmillan.

13.

Berlet

(2014) Heroes know which villains to kill: How coded rhetoric incites scripted violence. In: Feldman

Jackson

(eds) Doublespeak: The Rhetoric of the Far Right Since 1945. Ibidem-Verlag, pp.303–330.

14.

Berntzen

Sandberg

(2014) The collective nature of lone wolf terrorism: Anders Behring Breivik and the anti-Islamic social movement. Terrorism and Political Violence 26(5): 759–779.

15.

Blackman

(2014) Subculture theory: An historical and contemporary assessment of the concept for understanding deviance. Deviant Behavior 35(6): 496–512.

16.

Blakeley

Hayes

Kapor

, et al. (2019) Leaving the War on Terror. Transnational Institute.

17.

Blee

(2007) Ethnographies of the far right. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36(2): 119–128.

18.

Bouhana

Wilkstrom

(2011) Al Qa’ida-Influenced Radicalisation: A Rapid Evidence Assessment Guided by Situational Action Theory. Home Office. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/116724/occ97.pdf

19.

Boukalas

(2019) The prevent paradox: Destroying liberalism in order to protect it. Crime, Law and Social Change 72(4): 467–482. DOI:10.1007/s10611-019-09827-8

20.

Bowman-Grieve

(2009) Exploring “Stormfront”: A virtual community of the radical right. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 32(11): 989–1007.

21.

CAGE (2019) CCE Exposed. CAGE. Available at: https://www.cage.ngo/product/cce-exposed-report (accessed 21 August 2021).

22.

Campbell

(2012) Landscapes of performance: Stalking as choreography. Environment and Planning A 30(3): 400–417.

23.

Castle

Kristiansen

Shifflett

(2020) White racial activism and paper terrorism: A case study in far-right propaganda. Deviant Behavior 41(2): 252–267.

24.

Castle

Parsons

(2019) Vigilante or Viking? Contesting the mediated constructions of Soldiers of Odin Norge. Crime Media Culture 15(1): 47–66.

25.

Collins

(2021) Beyond the race-neutrality of Prevent: White Britain and the racialised threat. E-International Relations, 20 September. Available at: https://www.e-ir.info/2021/09/20/beyond-the-race-neutrality-of-prevent-white-britain-and-the-racialised-threat/ (accessed 12 October 2021).

26.

Collins

(2011) Hate: My Life in the British Far Right. Biteback.

27.

Comerford

(2020) Confronting the challenge of ‘post-organisational’ extremism. ORF. Available at: https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/confronting-the-challenge-of-post-organisational-extremism/ (accessed 23 January 2023).

28.

Commission for Countering Extremism (2021) Operating with impunity: Hateful extremism. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/operating-with-impunity-legal-review (accessed 24 July 2021).

29.

Condis

(2021) Playing at racism: White supremacist recruitment in online video game culture. In: Nilsen

Turner

(eds) White Supremacy and the American Media. Routledge, pp.246–274.

30.

Conti

(2017) Between rap and jihad: Spectacular subcutlures, terrorism and visuality. Contemporary Social Science 12(3–4): 272–284.

31.

Coppock

McGovern

(2014) Dangerous minds”? Deconstructing Counter-Terrorism Discourse, radicalisation and the “psychological vulnerability” of Muslim children and young people in Britain. Children & Society 28(3): 242–256.

32.

Cottee

(2011) Jihadism as a subcultural response to social strain: Extending Marc Sageman’s “bunch of guys” thesis. Terrorism and Political Violence 23(5): 730–751.

33.

Cottee

(2015a) The pre-terrorists among us. The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/counterterrorism-prevention-britain-isis/412603/ (accessed 30 June 2021).

34.

Cottee

(2015b) Jihadi cool: Why ISIS propaganda is so powerful. The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/12/isis-jihadi-cool/421776/ (accessed 10 January 2023).

35.

Cottee

(2020) The Western jihadi subculture and subterranean values. British Journal of Criminology 60(3): 762–781.

36.

Cottee

(2021) Incel (e)motives: Resentment, shame and revenge. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 44(2): 93–114.

37.

Cottee

(2022) Is Tucker Carlson a ‘stochastic terrorist’? UnHerd, 11 November. Available at: https://unherd.com/thepost/is-tucker-carlson-a-stochastic-terrorist/ (accessed 12 July 2023).

38.

Cottee

Hayward

(2011) Terrorist (e)motives: The existential attractions of terrorism. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 34(12): 963–986.

39.

Crone

(2016) Radicalization revisited: violence, politics and the skills of the body. International Affairs 92(3): 587–604. Available at.

40.

Daniels

(2018) The algorithmic rise of the “alt-right.” Contexts 17(1): 60–65.

41.

Davies

Leighton

Wyatt

(2021) The Palgrave Handbook of Social Harm. Springer International Publishing.

42.

Dear

(2013) Beheading the hydra? Does killing terrorist or insurgent leaders work? Defence Studies 13(3): 293–337.

43.

Diakopolous

(2014) Algorithmic accountability: On the investigation of black boxes. Columbia Journalism Review. Available at: https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/algorithmic_accountability_on_the_investigation_of_black_boxes.php/ (accessed 29 November 2022).

44.

Doroshenko

(2023) Like, share, comment, and repeat: Far-right messages, emotions, and amplification in social media. Journal of Information Technology & Politics 20(3): 286–302.

45.

Ekman

(2022) The great replacement: Strategic mainstreaming of far-right conspiracy claims. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28(4): 1127–1143.

46.

Europol (2020) European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend report (TE-SAT) 2020. Available at: https://www.europol.europa.eu/publications-events/main-reports/european-union-terrorism-situation-and-trend-report-te-sat-2020 (accessed 22 December 2022).

47.

Evans

(2018) From memes to Infowars: How 75 fascist activists were “red-pilled”. Bellingcat. Available at: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2018/10/11/memes-infowars-75-fascist-activists-red-pilled/ (accessed 23 July 2021).

48.

Faure Walker

(2019a) The emergence of ‘extremism’ and ‘Radicalisation’: An investigation into the discursive conditions that have enabled UK counter-terrorism strategy to focus on ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’, and a theorisation of the impact of this focus. PhD Thesis, UCL (University of London). Available at: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10080055/ (accessed 25 July 2021).

49.

Faure Walker

(2019b) The UK’s PREVENT counter-terrorism strategy appears to promote rather than prevent violence. Journal of Critical Realism 18(5): 487–512.

50.

Fekete

(2018) Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right. Verso.

51.

Ferrell

(2013) Cultural criminology. In: McLaughlin

Muncie

(eds) The Sage Dictionary of Criminology, 3rd edn. Sage, pp.110–112.

52.

Ferrell

Hayward

Morrison

, et al. (eds) (2004) Cultural Criminology Unleashed. GlassHouse Press.

53.

Ferrell

Hayward

Young

(2008) Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. Sage.

54.

Fielitz

Thurston

(eds) (2019) Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US. Transcript Verlag.

55.

Foucault

(1980) Prison talk. In: Gordon

(ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Pantheon, pp.37–54.

56.

Friberg

(2015) The Real Right Returns. Arktos.

57.

G2geek (2011) Stochastic Terrorism: Triggering the shooters. Daily Kos. Available at: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/1/10/934890/ (accessed 2 September 2024).

58.

Gailey

(2009) Starving is the most fun a girl can have”: The pro-ana subculture as edgework. Critical Criminology 17(2): 93–108.

59.

Ganesh

(2020) Weaponizing white thymos: Flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right. Cultural Studies 34(6): 892–924.

60.

Ganor

(2002) Defining terrorism: Is one man’s terrorist another man’s freedom fighter? Police Practice and Research 3(4): 287–304.

61.

Gardell

(2021) Lone Wolf Race Warriors and White Genocide. Cambridge University Press.

62.

Goldsmith

Wall

(2022) The seductions of cybercrime: Adolescence and the thrills of digital transgression. European Journal of Criminology 19(1): 98–117.

63.

Greene

(2019) “Deplorable” satire: Alt-right memes, white genocide tweets, and redpilling normies. Studies in American Humor 5(1): 31–69.

64.

Griffin

(1991) The Nature of Fascism. Routledge.

65.

Griffin

(2003) From slime mould to rhizome: An introduction to the groupuscular right. Patterns of Prejudice 37(1): 27–50.

66.

Griffin

Feldman

(eds) (2004) Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science. Routledge.

67.

Hall

Winlow

(2007) Cultural criminology and primitive accumulation: A formal introduction for two strangers who should really become more intimate. Crime Media Culture 3(1): 82–90.

68.

Hallsworth

Young

(2008) Gang talk and gang talkers: A critique. Crime Media Culture 4(2): 175–195.

69.

Hamm

(1994) American Skinheads: The Criminology and Control of Hate Crime. Greenwood Publishing.

70.

Hamm

(2004) Apocalyptic violence: The seduction of terrorist subcultures. Theoretical Criminology 8(3): 323–339.

71.

Hamm

Spaaij

(2017) The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism. Columbia University Press, p.336.

72.

Hartleb

(2020) Lone Wolves: The New Terrorism of Right-Wing Single Actors. Springer.

73.

Hatewatch (2017) Donning the mask: Presenting ‘The face of 21st century fascism’. Southern Poverty Law Center. Available at: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/06/20/donning-mask-presenting-face-21st-century-fascism (accessed 30 September 2022).

74.

Hayward

Schuilenburg

(2014) To resist = to create? Some thoughts on the concept of resistance in cultural criminology. Tijdschrift over Cultuur & Criminaliteit 4(1): 22–36.

75.

Hayward

(2002) The vilification and pleasures of youthful transgression. In: Muncie

(ed.) Youth Justice: Critical Readings. Sage, pp.80–93.

76.

Hayward

(2012) Five spaces of cultural criminology. The British Journal of Criminology 52(3): 441–462. DOI:10.1093/bjc/azs008

77.

Hayward

(2016) Cultural criminology: Script rewrites. Theoretical Criminology 20(3): 297–321.

78.

Heath-Kelly

(2013) Counter-terrorism and the counterfactual: Producing the “radicalisation” discourse and the UK PREVENT strategy. British Journal of Politics & International Relations 15(3): 394–415.

79.

Heath-Kelly

(2017) The geography of pre-criminal space: Epidemiological imaginations of radicalisation risk in the UK prevent strategy, 2007-2017. Critical Studies on Terrorism 10(2): 297–319.

80.

Hebdige

(1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Methuen.

81.

Heikkilä

(2017) Online antagonism of the alt-right in the 2016 election. European Journal of American Studies 12(2): 1–22. DOI: 10.4000/ejas.12140

82.

Hemmingsen

A-S

(2015) Viewing jihadism as a counterculture: Potential and limitations. Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression 7(1): 3–17.

83.

Hesse

Zak

(2016) Does this haircut make me look like a Nazi?. Washington Post, 30 November. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/11/30/does-this-haircut-make-me-look-like-a-nazi/ (accessed 30 September 2022).

84.

Hillis

Paasonen

Petit

(2015) Networked Affect. MIT Press.

85.

HM Government (2011) Prevent Strategy. Home Office.

86.

HM Government (2012) Channel Duty Guidance: Protecting People Vulnerable to Being Drawn Into Terrorism. Home Office.

87.

HM Government (2019) Online Harms White Paper. The Stationary Office, Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/973939/Online_Harms_White_Paper_V2.pdf

88.

Holt

Freilich

Chermak

(2017) Internet-based radicalization as enculturation to violent deviant subcultures. Deviant Behavior 38(8): 855–869.

89.

Home Office (2015) Home Secretary: We must work together to defeat terrorism. GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretary-we-must-work-together-to-defeat-terrorism (accessed 3 January 2023).

90.

Hope Not Hate (2022) State of Hate 2022: On the March Again. Hope Not Hate.

91.

Hummel

(2021) The iron march forum and the evolution of the “skull mask” neo-fascist network. Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Available at: https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-iron-march-forum-and-the-evolution-of-the-skull-mask-neo-fascist-network/ (accessed 30 September 2022).

92.

Ilan

(2019) Cultural criminology: The time is now. Critical Criminology 27(1): 5–20.

93.

Jackson

(2011) In defence of “terrorism”: Finding a way through a forest of misconceptions. Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression 3(2): 116–130.

94.

Jacobs

Potter

(1997) Hate crimes: A critical perspective. Crime and Justice 22: 1–50.

95.

Jenness

(2001) The hate crime canon and beyond: A critical assessment. Law and Critique 12(3): 279–308.

96.

Jensen

Larsen

Sandberg

(2022) Rap, Islam and jihadi cool: The attractions of the Western jihadi subculture. Crime Media Culture 18(3): 430–445.

97.

Kaplan

(1997) Leaderless resistance. Terrorism and Political Violence 9(3): 80–95.

98.

Katz

(1988) Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. Basic Books.

99.

Katz

(2022) Saints and Soldiers: Inside Internet Age Terrorism, From Syria to the Capitol Siege. Columbia University Press.

100.

Kemper

(2022) AI and stochastic terrorism – Should it be done? In: 2022 IEEE international symposium on software reliability engineering workshops (ISSREW), pp.347–356. DOI: 10.1109/ISSREW55968.2022.00091

101.

Kennedy

(2022) Neo-Nazi uses codewords to spread hate on YouTube. The Times, 1 September. Available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/neo-nazi-uses-codewords-to-spread-hate-on-youtube-kqqs6lrkf (accessed 25 November 2022).

102.

Kinnvall

(2019) Populism, ontological insecurity and Hindutva: Modi and the masculinization of Indian politics. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 32(3): 283–302.

103.

Kisic Merino

Kinnvall

(2023) Governing emotions: Hybrid media, ontological insecurity and the normalisation of far-right fantasies. Alternatives 48(1): 54–73.

104.

Knefel

(2013) Everything you’ve been told about radicalization is wrong. Rolling Stone, 6 May. Available at: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/everything-youve-been-told-about-radicalization-is-wrong-80445/ (accessed 10 June 2022).

105.

Kramer

ADI

Guillory

Hancock

(2014) Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(24): 8788–8790.

106.

Kundnani

(2012) Radicalisation: The journey of a concept. Race & Class 54(2): 3–25.

107.

Kundnani

(2014) The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. Verso Books.

108.

Kundnani

Hayes

(2018) The Globalisation of Countering Violent Extremism Policies: Undermining Human Rights, Instrumentalising Civil Society. Transnational Institute.

109.

Larsen

Jensen

(2023) The new far right, subcultural theory, and the sociology of emotions. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. Epub ahead of print 4 January 2023. DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2022.2163458

110.

Lee

(2019) “Overview of the Far-Right”, paper commissioned by the Commission for Countering Extremism. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/overview-of-the-far-right (accessed 13 August 2024).

111.

Lee

Knott

(2022) Fascist aspirants: Fascist Forge and ideological learning in the extreme-right online milieu. Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression 14(3): 216–240.

112.

Leser

Spissinger

(2020) The functionality of affects: Conceptualising far-right populist politics beyond negative emotions. Global Discourse 10(2): 325–342.

113.

Lewis

(2020) The joke’s on us. The Atlantic, 30 September. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/09/how-memes-lulz-and-ironic-bigotry-won-internet/616427/ (accessed 16 January 2023).

114.

Lewis

(2018) Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube. Data & Society. Available at: https://datasociety.net/library/alternative-influence/.

115.

Lyng

(1990) Edgework: A social psychological analysis of voluntary risk taking. American Journal of Sociology 95(4): 851–886.

116.

Lyng

(2004) Crime, edgework and corporeal transaction. Theoretical Criminology 8(3): 359–375.

117.

Marcks

Pawelz

(2022) From myths of victimhood to fantasies of violence: How far-right narratives of imperilment work. Terrorism and Political Violence 34(7): 1415–1432.

118.

Massanari

(2017) #gamergate and the fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society 19(3): 329–346.

119.

May

(2015) A stronger Britain, built on our values. GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/a-stronger-britain-built-on-our-values (accessed 21 December 2021).

120.

McCann

CJJ

(2019) The Prevent Strategy and Right-Wing Extremism: A Case Study of the English Defence League. Routledge.

121.

McDonald

(2020) Radicalization. Polity.

122.

Merton

(1968) Social Theory and Social Structure. The Free Press.

123.

Miller

(2022) Social media and system collapse: How extremists built an international Neo-Nazi network. In: Hubscher

von Mering

(eds) Antisemitism on Social Media. Routledge, pp.93–113.

124.

Miller-Idriss

(2018) The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany. Princeton University Press.

125.

Mondon

Winter

(2020) Reactionary Democracy How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream. Verso.

126.

Moore

Roberts

(2021) Post-Internet Far Right: Fascism in the Age of the Internet. Dog Section Press.

127.

Moses

(2019) White genocide” and the ethics of public analysis. Journal of Genocide Research 21(2): 201–213.

128.

Mudde

(2019) The Far Right Today. Polity Press.

129.

Muggleton

Weinzierl

(eds) (2003) The Post-Subcultures Reader. Berg.

130.

Mulhall

(2018) A post-organisational far right? HOPE not hate. Available at: https://hopenothate.org.uk/research-old/state-of-hate-2018/online-radicalisation/post-organisational-far-right/ (accessed 23 January 2023).

131.

Muncie

(2001) Subculture. In: McLaughlin

Muncie

(eds) The Sage Dictionary of Criminology. Sage, pp.296–298.

132.

Munn

(2019) Alt-right pipeline: Individual journeys to extremism online. First Monday 24(6). DOI: 10.5210/fm.v24i6.10108

133.

Munn

(2020) Angry by design: Toxic communication and technical architectures. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7(1): 1–11.

134.

Murray

(2017) The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. Bloomsbury.

135.

Neumann

(2008) Introduction. In: Perspectives on radicalisation and political violence: Papers from the first international conference on radicalisation and political violence, London, 17–18 January 2008, pp.3–7. ICSR.

136.

Nilsson

P-E

(2022) Manifestos of white nationalist ethno-soldiers. Critical Research on Religion 10(2): 221–235.

137.

Onursal

Kirkpatrick

(2021) Is extremism the “new” terrorism? the convergence of “extremism” and “terrorism” in British parliamentary discourse. Terrorism and Political Violence 33(5): 1094–1116.

138.

O’Brien

(2005) What is cultural about cultural criminology? British Journal of Criminology 45(5): 599–612.

139.

O’Callaghan

Greene

Conway

, et al. (2015) Down the (white) rabbit hole: The extreme right and online recommender systems. Social Science Computer Review 33(4): 459–478.

140.

Paasonen

(2018) Networked affect. In: Braidotti

HlavaJova

(eds) Posthuman Glossary. Bloomsbury, pp.283–284.

141.

Pasquale

(2015) The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Harvard University Press.

142.

Paxton

(2004) The Anatomy of Fascism. Alfred A. Knopf.

143.

Perry

Olsson

(2009) Cyberhate: The globalization of hate. Information & Communications Technology Law 18(2): 185–199.

144.

Pisoiu

(2015) Subcultural theory applied to jihadi and right-wing radicalization in Germany. Terrorism and Political Violence 27(1): 9–28.

145.

Presser

(2009) The narratives of offenders. Theoretical Criminology 13(2): 177–200.

146.

Presser

(2012) Getting on top through mass murder: Narrative, metaphor, and violence. Crime Media Culture 8(1): 3–21.

147.

Presser

Sandberg

(2015) Research strategies for narrative criminology. In: Miller

Palacios

(eds) Qualitative Research in Criminology. Routledge, pp.85–99.

148.

Ravndal

Bjørgo

(2018) Investigating terrorism from the extreme right: A review of past and present research. Perspectives on Terrorism 12(6): 5–22.

149.

Ribeiro

Ottoni

West

, et al. (2020) Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube. In: Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency. FAT* ’20: Conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, Barcelona Spain, pp.131–141. ACM. DOI: 10.1145/3351095.3372879.

150.

Robinson

RAH

(1981) Fascism in Europe. The Historical Association.

151.

Roose

(2019) The making of a YouTube radical. The New York Times, 8 June. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html (accessed 25 November 2022).

152.

Sageman

(2004) Understanding Terror Networks. University of Pennsylvania Press.

153.

Salazar

P-J

(2018) The alt-right as a community of discourse. Javnost - The Public 25(1-2): 135–143.

154.

Schmid

(2004) Terrorism – the definitional problem. Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 36(2): 375.

155.

Schuurman

Taylor

(2018) Reconsidering radicalization: Fanaticism and the link between ideas and violence. Perspectives on Terrorism 12(1): 3–22.

156.

Sedgwick

(2010) The concept of radicalization as a source of confusion. Terrorism and Political Violence 22(4): 479–494.

157.

See

Gorard

Siddiqui

(2017) Does participation in uniformed group activities in school improve young people’s non-cognitive outcomes? International Journal of Educational Research 85: 109–120.

158.

Sian

(2017) Born radicals? Prevent, positivism, and “race-thinking.” Palgrave Communications 3(1): 1–8.

159.

Sibley

(2024) Behind the British new far-right’s veil: Do individuals adopt strategic liberalism to appear more moderate or are they semi-liberal? British Journal of Politics & International Relations 26(1): 79–95.

160.

Skoczylis

Andrews

(2020) A conceptual critique of prevent: Can prevent be saved? No, but. . .. Critical Social Policy 40(3): 350–369.

161.

Smith

(2005) Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez. University of Chicago Press.

162.

Strübel

Sklar

(2022) Fred Perry: Polos for all. In: Conner

(ed.) Subcultures. Emerald Publishing, pp.73–90.

163.

Sunde

Ilan

Sandberg

(2021) A cultural criminology of “new” jihad: Insights from propaganda magazines. Crime Media Culture 17(2): 271–287.

164.

Theweleit

(1987) Male Fantasies. Volume One: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Blackwell Polity.

165.

Tiffany

(2021) The alt-right has lost control of ‘redpill’. The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/04/red-pill-meme-alt-right-twitter/618577/ (accessed 16 January 2023).

166.

Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (2019) Designating hate: New policy responses to stop hate crime. Available at: https://www.institute.global/insights/geopolitics-and-security/designating-hate-new-policy-responses-stop-hate-crime (accessed 25 July 2023).

167.

Tufekci

(2017) We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. TED, 27 October. Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads?language=en (accessed 6 December 2022).

168.

Tufekci

(2018) YouTube, the great radicalizer. The New York Times, 10 March. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html (accessed 25 November 2022).

169.

Turner-Graham

(2015) Subcultural style: Fashion and Britain’s extreme right. In: Copsey

Richardson

(eds) Cultures of Post-War British Fascism. Routledge, pp.128–141.

170.

Tuters

Hagen

(2020) (((They))) rule: Memetic antagonism and nebulous othering on 4chan. New Media & Society 22(12): 2218–2237.

171.

US Department of Justice (2019) Additional charges filed in tree of life synagogue shooting. Available at: https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdpa/pr/additional-charges-filed-tree-life-synagogue-shooting-0 (accessed 12 July 2023).

172.

Virchow

(2007) Performance, emotion, and ideology: On the creation of “collectives of emotion” and worldview in the contemporary German far right. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36(2): 147–164.

173.

Whittaker

Looney

Reed

, et al. (2021) Recommender systems and the amplification of extremist content. Internet Policy Review 10(2): 1–29.

174.

Williams

(2011) A haircut returns from the 1930s. The New York Times, 15 November. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/fashion/a-haircut-returns-from-the-1930s.html (accessed 30 September 2022).

175.

Wood

(2017) Antisocial media and algorithmic deviancy amplification: Analysing the id of Facebook’s technological unconscious. Theoretical Criminology 21(2): 168–185.

176.

Wood

(2021) Rethinking how technologies harm. British Journal of Criminology 61(3): 627–647.

177.

Woo

(2002) Quantitative terrorism risk assessment. Journal of Risk Finance 4(1): 7–14.

178.

Yesilada

Lewandowsky

(2022) Systematic review: YouTube recommendations and problematic content. Internet policy review 11(1): 1–22.

179.

Younis

(2021) The psychologisation of counter-extremism: unpacking prevent. Race & Class 62(3): 37–60.

180.

Zedner

(2021) Countering terrorism or criminalizing curiosity? The troubled history of UK responses to right-wing and other extremism. Common Law World Review 50(1): 57–75.

181.

Žižek

(2008) Violence. Profile Books.

182.

Žižek

(2018) Troubles with Identity. The Philosophical Salon, 28 May. Available at: https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/troubles-with-identity/ (accessed 25 January 2023).

Cultural criminology,counter-extremism and the contemporary far right

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The contemporary far right and counter-extremism

The language of counter-extremism

‘Extremism’

‘Radicalisation’

‘Terrorism’

Cultural criminology and the contemporary far right

Subculture and style

Beliefs and values different from that of mainstream culture

A specialised vocabulary

A shared subcultural style

Networked digital media

Emotions and weaponised affect

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References