Author
Abstract
This article interrogates how “right-wing extremism” is problematised in German federal-level policies to prevent and counter violent extremism (P/CVE). While scholarship has critiqued European P/CVE for its disproportionate focus on “Islamist extremism” and its “blind spot” regarding “right-wing extremism”, comparatively little work has examined how the latter is problematised once it enters the policy agenda. Employing Carol Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) policy analysis method alongside a critical race theoretical framework, I analyse 15 German federal-level P/CVE and anti-racism policy documents published between 2016 and 2024. I identify three dominant problem representations of “right-wing extremism”: 1) as a threat to the democratic order, 2) as ideological vulnerability and 3) as institutional failure. These representations, I argue, depoliticise racial violence, obscure structural white supremacy and reproduce Cold War–era logics of anti-left and anti-totalitarian governance, rendering “right-wing extremism” an external aberration rather than entangled with a shifting “societal centre”. The article takes up the metaphor of “filling-in” – used to describe how the visual system compensates for blind spots – to analyse how German P/CVE policy “fills in” its blind spot on “right-wing extremism” using conceptual tools drawn from its history of countering “left-wing extremism”. Drawing on Charles W. Mills’ concept of the Racial Contract, I propose moving beyond the “extremism” frame to theorise this phenomenon as a historically grounded form of racial violence arising from structural white supremacy. Such a rethinking offers a sharper analytical lens and opens space for an emancipatory politics that centres those most harmed by both state and non-state racial violence.
Full Citation: Stevenson, R. K. B. (2026). Filling in the blind spot? Problematisations of ‘right-wing extremism’ in German federal-level P/CVE policy. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 19(1), 85–111. https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2025.2609379