The Cliquet effect, or ratchet effect, describes a phenomenon where processes or systems become difficult, if not impossible, to reverse once they have reached a certain stage. This concept, originally articulated by James Duesenberry in Income, Saving, and the Theory of Consumer Behavior (1949), finds applications across disciplines, from economics to politics and law. It also serves as a powerful metaphor for the creeping expansion of government measures during crises, particularly in the context of antiterrorism legislation.
This blog post explores how the Cliquet effect influences the trajectory of antiterrorism laws, using examples from various European countries, where initial emergency measures have often solidified into enduring policies, shaping governance and civil liberties in profound ways.
The Mechanics of the Cliquet Effect
The Cliquet effect borrows its name from the ratcheting mechanism in horology, which prevents a wheel from moving backward. Similarly, once a social, economic, or legal process crosses a certain threshold, it tends to resist reversal. The concept applies to human behavior—such as consumption habits that prove difficult to curtail—but it holds particular resonance in political systems. Governments often introduce extensive bureaucratic or legislative measures during crises, and once these systems are established, dismantling them becomes a formidable challenge.
For example, economist Robert Higgs, in his book Crisis and Leviathan, used this effect to explain the seemingly irreversible growth of government during crises. Wars and emergencies often justify unprecedented interventions, which later persist long after the crisis subsides. In democratic systems, Yves-Marie Adeline[1] has argued that sociopolitical shifts—particularly those aligned with progressive ideologies—often become entrenched, as subsequent administrations lack either the will or the political capital to undo them.
The Cliquet Effect in Antiterrorism Legislation
The Cliquet effect is especially evident in antiterrorism legislation, where governments adopt extraordinary measures in response to immediate threats. These laws, though introduced as temporary safeguards, often evolve into permanent fixtures, reshaping the balance between national security and individual freedoms. The rationale is rooted in the political cost of reversing these measures: dismantling them risks exposing a nation to criticism or vulnerability, even if the original threat has diminished.
European Case Studies
A few examples of the Cliquet effect in action count the case of France. Indeed, following the Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015, the country declared a state of emergency (état d’urgence), granting authorities sweeping powers to conduct searches, impose curfews, and restrict gatherings. Initially meant to last 12 days, the state of emergency was extended multiple times and lasted nearly two years. In 2017, many of its provisions were codified into the French security law, effectively making permanent what was initially temporary.
In the same idea, the UK has long grappled with terrorism, and its Prevent strategy, part of the broader counterterrorism framework, illustrates the Cliquet effect in action. Introduced to prevent radicalization, Prevent mandates surveillance and reporting responsibilities for teachers, healthcare workers, and other public servants. While the program has faced criticism for stigmatizing communities and eroding trust, successive governments have expanded rather than scaled it back.
Lastly, Spain’s experience with terrorism—particularly from ETA and later Islamist groups—has led to stringent antiterrorism laws. The expansion of police powers, limitations on judicial review, and broad definitions of terrorism have drawn criticism for potentially undermining freedoms. Yet, reversing these measures remains politically sensitive, especially in light of recurring security threats.
Legal Foundations and the Irreversibility of Rights
Interestingly, and on a lighter note, the Cliquet effect operates not only to expand government powers but also to safeguard fundamental rights. In France, for instance, the Constitutional Council has invoked the effect to protect liberties from regression. Notable decisions, such as those concerning press freedoms and academic autonomy, have established that laws reducing fundamental rights are unconstitutional unless they provide equivalent or enhanced protections.This dual nature of the Cliquet effect underscores its complexity: while it can entrench restrictive measures, it can also serve as a bulwark against the erosion of rights. In the realm of antiterrorism, however, the balance often tilts toward security at the expense of liberties.
In the same idea, several antiterrorism laws have been repealed or allowed to expire once the immediate threat they were enacted to address subsided. For instance, in the United States, provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, including the controversial Section 215 that allowed mass telephone metadata collection, were permitted to expire in 2020. Similarly, the United Kingdom’s Defence of the Realm Act, which granted extensive wartime powers during World War I, was repealed in 1921 after the war ended. In Spain, harsh anti-terrorism laws implemented during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship were dismantled following his death as the country transitioned to democracy. South Africa’s Internal Security Act, used to suppress dissent during apartheid, was repealed in 1991 during the country’s democratization. In Italy, emergency anti-terrorism measures introduced during the politically turbulent “Years of Lead” were gradually rolled back as stability returned. These examples highlight how countries often roll back extraordinary powers granted during crises, though this process frequently occurs under significant public and political pressure.
Lessons and Reflections
The Cliquet effect reveals the paradox of governance during crises: the measures we adopt to address immediate dangers often outlast their utility, embedding themselves into the fabric of law and policy. In the case of antiterrorism legislation, this dynamic poses critical questions for democratic societies. How can we ensure that extraordinary measures do not become ordinary governance? What safeguards can prevent the gradual erosion of freedoms under the guise of security?
As the various European examples show, reversing antiterrorism laws is rare, even when the threat landscape changes. Addressing this requires a conscious effort to design legislation with built-in sunset clauses, periodic reviews, and robust oversight mechanisms. Without these safeguards, the Cliquet effect risks becoming a ratchet not only on government expansion but also on the fundamental freedoms that underpin democratic life.
[1] Adeline, Yves-Marie. La Droite impossible. Éditions Godefroy de Bouillon, 2012. (Revised edition of La Droite piégée, 1996).
Heidi Campana Piva, at the 16th World Congress of the IASS: "Signs and Realities" – September 5th, 2024, Warsaw (Poland).
RELIGION, CONSPIRACY THEORIES, RADICALIZATION, AND FUNDAMENTALISM
Dawson (2024: 142) criticizes the stance taken by largely secular contemporary scholars who tend to be suspicious of the “primacy and/or authenticity of religious commitments”, seeing them as non-rational. To most, “recognising the religiousness of the [radicalization] process seems to diminish the capacity to explain it”, in a way that such scholars end up searching for different reasons (e.g. psychological and social motivations) as to why people may come to be radicalized (Ibid). Nevertheless, it is not possible to overlook the role of religion in this matter, since it “covers strategies for legitimising and delegitimising claims to authority, moral behaviour and ideas about what is the correct relation to other social groups” (Dyrendal 2020: 372). Besides, “there is no important practical difference between terrorism on behalf of political ideology and that on behalf of religion” (Coolsaet 2024: 44).
Broadly, Dyrendal (2020) describes three kinds of dynamics that can be used to describe the relationships between conspiracy theories and religion:
a) conspiracy theories in religion,
b) conspiracy theory as religion, and
c) conspiracy theories about religion.
The first one (conspiracy theories in religion) deals “with different sets of conspiracy beliefs ideologically attuned to the particular religious group and circumstance”, the second (conspiracy theory as religion) “centres on the philosophical and psychological underpinnings of ideation”, and the last (conspiracy theories aboutreligion) “focuses on ingroup/outgroup dynamics in complex socio-political situations” (Ibid, 371).
Conspiracy theories in religion relate mostly to authority and power, since they are usually employed to delegitimize those that are seen as enemies. Of course, different religions have different power structures, and this will affect their dynamics with conspiracy theories. The latter can be “used both from the top down (by those in power) and from the bottom up (by the powerless and to criticise power)” (Önnerfors 2021: 26), in a way that more marginalised religions frequently use conspiracy theories as a language of opposition while heterodox or mainstream religions use them as a language of counter-subversion (Dyrendal 2020: 381).
An example of this was the case of the Brazilian Senator Damares Alves who detailed, during an evangelical worship in 2022, a conspiracy involving sexual child slaves, following the style of QAnon. As Pastor, Damares Alves publicly described (in horrifying detail) the workings of this supposed case of sexual abuse of children in the Island of Marajó, Northeastern Brazil. The conspiracy theory she chronicled during the worship was immediately followed by a discourse regarding how the then-President Jair Bolsonaro was the only one fighting to end such activities. The Pastor/Senator stated: “The war against Bolsonaro, which the press has raised, which the Supreme Court has raised, which Congress has raised, believe me, is not a political war. It is a spiritual war.” (Duchiade 2022, translated by the author). What is possible to see in this case was the wielding of religious sensibilities in the service of political interests through the direct application of a conspiracy theory. The Church’s role “as guardian of threatened, traditional values in the face of internal and external threats is a common conspiracy trope, and its role as violated victim of evil a common trope of the culture wars” (Dyrendal 2020: 376). The interests of the Brazilian Evangelical Church, represented by Pastor Damares Alves, became intertwined with the interests of Bolsonaro’s political party. The Church was thus “playing a supporting role in the symbolic assertion” (Ibid, 377) of Bolsonaro as president.
Nevertheless, it’s important to note that “religion does not play a simple, unified role” (Ibid, 381), in a way that when faced with such cases, we must always ask “who speaks, in what context and for which interests, as well as about what authority they claim” (Dyrendal 2020: 381). Damares Alves does not speak for all evangelicals in Brazil, but it is unquestionable that her spread of this conspiracy theory had an effect over a considerable portion of the nation.
It is also important to highlight that “religious adherence does not necessarily predict specific conspiracy beliefs one way or the other” (Ibid, 375). In fact, there are examples of religious leaders helping to combat anti-vaccination campaigns by providing “theological arguments for vaccines being acceptable”, including the “production of halal-certified vaccines”, showing how religious authority was adopted “to oppose the crisis narrative the conspiracy theory presented” (Ibid, 378) – an example of how conspiracy theories in religion can have positive outcomes. It is still possible to state that “some types of religion seem to have a higher, more general propensity towards conspiracy beliefs than others”, which is the case with fundamentalist groups, who are “more likely to have apocalyptic expectations” and Manicheist views (Ibid, 375).
More specifically, ‘fundamentalism’ is here understood as a modern ideology, measure, or action that is reactionary towards modern developments (rejects current liberal ethics, science, or technology) and is based on a historical narrative presented in terms of cosmic dualism, that is, the notion of paradise and a fall from it (adapted from Peels 2023: 743).
On a similar note, it is possible to argue that New Age religions/spirituality are also shown to feature “overlaps with belief in conspiracy theories – so-called ‘conspirituality’” (Önnerfors 2021: 29). Conspirituality refers to a politico-spiritual philosophy based on convictions that, although religious/spiritual in nature, are presented in the form of a conspiracy theory, where: the social order is secretly controlled by an unenlightened group of people and the only salvation is in the ‘paradigm shift in consciousness’ that will promote an awakened worldview (adapted from Demuru 2022). In these cases, we are dealing with conspiracy theory as religion.
Serving “either to consolidate or destabilise power relationships, depending on who has conjured them and in what context”, modern conspiracy theories substitute “previous conceptions of divine will or fate”, situating “the agency and power to intervene in human affairs within the realm of pre-political or pre-social order, or within hidden human (sometimes alien) dimensions of organised darkness and invisibility where they develop and unfold their force” (Önnerfors & Krouwel 2021: 259). In other words, “by giving the impression of being scientific while at the same time providing answers to existential questions (without explaining them in purely religious terms),” conspiracy theories “can thus be regarded as part of the political religion within a more secular society”, being “more easily accepted by people who do not define themselves as religious” (Önnerfors 2021: 29).
This view of conspiracy theory as religion thus regards the idea that the former is replacing the later by exerting its functions in a now more secularized society. However, this notion can be questioned, since it is first of all not possible to state that we have more conspiracy theories today than during a time when religious adherence was supposedly stronger, and also because “religion is usually not negatively correlated with conspiracy beliefs”, suggesting the two go hand-in-hand, rather than one replacing the other (Dyrendal 2020: 373). Instead of thinking of conspiracy theory as a substitute of religion, we may think of the ways in which conspiracy theory can be seen as a form of religion. In this regard, Ladini (2022: 34-35) suggests “caution when arguing about similarities between individual religiosity and conspiracy beliefs”, recommending “to always consider which dimensions of religiosity” are being accounted for “when analysing the association between the two concepts”. Dyrendal (2020: 373) suggests two main dimensions: the social and the epistemic. The epistemic regards the status of both religion and conspiracy theories as alternative/counter-knowledge, while the social is related to the how they both organise collective identities on the basis of in-group and out-group (Ibid).
According to Önnerfors (2021: 29), the narrative structure of conspiracy thinking “is closely related to myths, intuitive explanations of the world through reference to supernatural forces which have the power to intervene in and influence people’s lives”. As such, conspiracy theories “convey clearly religiously coded ideas about the dualistic battle between good and evil (theodicy) and ideas about Judgment Day (eschatology)” (Ibid). Additionally, both conspiracy theories and religion “present a worldview that is largely teleological, and they present parallel epistemologies that make claims ‘unfalsifiable’” (Dyrendal 2020: 372). Other cognitive factors that underlie both conspiracy and religious beliefs are “the proclivity to see intention as a cause”, as well as “increased holistic, intuitive, symbolic and magical thinking, which again correlate to an increase in the tendency towards seeing things as related in meaningful patterns” (Ibid, 375), and the “attribution of agency to hidden forces” (Ladini 2022: 35). In this sense, although I would not argue that conspiracy theories and religion are the same, it may be possible to see conspiracy theories as working in a similar way to that of religious belief systems, since they can both represent a “resource for understanding the world, for identity construction, for ordering social relations, and for gaining or disputing authority and power” (Dyrendal 2020: 380-381).
As for conspiracy theories about religion, I would like to highlight my case-study, the Eurabia conspiracy theory. Bergman (2021: 37) traces the origins of this narrative to “several influential publications” that “have warned of an Islamist conspiracy of occupying the West”. The first one pointed out by the author is the 1973 dystopian novel Le Camp des Saints by French writer Jean Raspail, which “depicts the cultural demise of Western civilisation through mass migration of sex-crazed Indians” (Ibid, 38). However, this “fear of cultural subversion is, though, only the first part of the full conspiracy theory”, whose “completion usually also takes the form of accusing a domestic elite of betraying the ‘good ordinary people’ into the hands of the external evil”. This core message was also prevalent in the book Eurabia – The Euro-Arab Axis by Giséle Littman, an influential text to the conspiracy theory which maintains that “ever since the early 1970s, the European Union was secretly conspiring with the Arab League to bring about a ‘Eurabia’ on the continent” (Ibid, 39). Additionally, the book While Europe Slept – How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within by an American author called Bruce Bawer was also highlighted by Bergman, this time expanding the conspiracy
Similar to Eurabia, the Great Replacement became popular after the “deeply controversial French philosopher, Renaud Camus, used it for the title of his book published in 2011”, in which “he argued that European civilisation and identity was at risk of being subsumed by mass migration, especially from Muslim countries, and because of low birth rates among the native French people” (Ibid, 37). The conspiracy theory thus expands on this idea, stating that the predominantly white Christian population of Western countries is being progressively replaced by Muslims or other groups of migrants due to the secret orchestrations of malignant internal forces that seek the extinction of native populations (adapted from Krouwel & van Prooijen 2021; Bergmann 2021; Gualda 2021; Önnerfors 2021).
Generally, the Eurabia and The Great Replacement conspiracy theories have “often become entangled in a more general opposition to immigration” (Bergmann 2021: 40), connected to political statements of failed integration (Ekman 2022: 1128), that turn immigration into an ‘invasion’ that threatens people’s culture and identity. A different facet of this interpreted ‘invasion’ is reflected on the fears surrounding the fall in the birth rates of the European population, which is often referred to as ‘demographic suicide’ – the idea that Europe is “‘systematically depopulating itself’; meanwhile, Europe’s Muslims appear to be dreaming of filling this vacuum” (Gualda 2021: 60).
The Eurabia and related conspiracy theories have been among “the most fast-growing amongst Neo-Nationalists, rooting in countries like Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy and the UK”, as well as the Netherlands and Belgium (Bergmann, 2021: 37). They have “progressed through all three waves of Neo-Nationalism” (Bergmann 2021: 48-49). During the first wave (the Oil Crisis of the 1970s), they “still only thrived on the periphery of European politics”, becoming “much more prominent in the second wave [(post-collapse of communism)], especially after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001”. However, it was in the third wave (the financial crisis of 2008), “that the Eurabia theory moved firmly into the mainstream, especially after the refugee crisis of 2015”, which “brought the Eurabia theory to new heights” (Ibid). Nowadays, it is common to find political leaders who propagate such conspiracy theories (Ekman 2022: 1127), which points to how “radicalization can be induced by state actors (especially those dependent upon electoral support mechanisms)” (Steiner & Önnerfors 2018: 12).
As such, radicalization, and its use of religious conspiracy theories (or conspiracy theories about religion) can be potentially seen as agenda setting, leading to a moment when a formerly radical position becomes normalized (Ibid, 21) – as is the case with the rapid swing to the right taken by western countries over the last decade. It has been pointed out how populists often “make use of various other conspiracy theories to persuade potential constituents into believing that they are the real outsiders able to fight back against the concerted machinations of the (political) establishment” (Harambam 2020: 3), when in fact they are frequently part of it. As formerly radicalized expressions get to the mainstream, the radical achieves the potential of its transformative power (Steiner & Önnerfors 2018). And the religious dimensions or aspects contained or instrumentalized in such conspiracy theories cannot be ignored.
REFERENCES
Bergmann, E. (2021). The Eurabia conspiracy theory. In: Önnerfors, A., & Krouwel, A. (Eds.), Europe: Continent of Conspiracies: Conspiracy Theories in and about Europe. Routledge, 36-53.
Coolsaet, R. (2024). The emergence and expansion of a contentious concept. In: Busher, J., Malkki, L., & Marsden, S. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook on Radicalisation and Countering Radicalisation. Routledge, 34-52.
Dawson, L. L. (2024). Insights from the study of new religious movements into the process of radicalisation. In: Busher, J., Malkki, L., & Marsden, S. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook on Radicalisation and Countering Radicalisation. Routledge, 132-149.
Demuru, P. (2022). Qanons, anti-vaxxers, and alternative health influencers: a cultural semiotic perspective on the links between conspiracy theories, spirituality, and wellness during the Covid-19 pandemic, Social Semiotics, 32:5, 588-605.
Duchiade, A. (2022, October 11). Suposto abuso sexual contra crianças citado por Damares circula como ficção na internet desde 2010. O Globo. https://oglobo.globo.com/blogs/sonar-a-escuta-das-redes/noticia/2022/10/suposta-violencia-infantil-citada-por-damares-circula-como-ficcao-na-internet-desde-2010.ghtml
Dyrendal, A. (2020). Conspiracy Theory and Religion. In: Butter, M., Knight, P. (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. Routledge, 304-316.
Ekman, M. (2022). The great replacement: Strategic mainstreaming of far-right conspiracy claims. Convergence, 28(4), 1127-1143.
Gualda, E. (2021). Metaphors of Invasion, Imagining Europe as Endangered by Islamisation. In: Önnerfors, A., & Krouwel, A. (Eds.), Europe: Continent of Conspiracies: Conspiracy Theories in and about Europe. Routledge, 54-75.
Harambam, J. (2020). Contemporary Conspiracy Culture: Truth And Knowledge in An Era of Epistemic Instability. Routledge.
Krouwel, A., & van Prooijen, J. W. (2021). The new European order? Euroscepticism and conspiracy belief. In: Önnerfors, A., & Krouwel, A. (Eds.), Europe: Continent of Conspiracies: Conspiracy Theories in and about Europe. Routledge, 22-35.
Ladini, R. (2022). Religious and conspiracist? An analysis of the relationship between the dimensions of individual religiosity and belief in a big pharma conspiracy theory. Italian Political Science Review, 52(1), 33-50.
Önnerfors, A. (2021). Conspiracy theories and COVID-19: The mechanisms behind a rapidly growing societal challenge. Myndigheten för Samhällsskydd och Beredskap.
Önnerfors, A., & Krouwel, A. (2021). Between Internal Enemies and External Threats; How conspiracy theories have shaped Europe – an introduction. In: Önnerfors, A., & Krouwel, A. (Eds.), Europe: Continent of Conspiracies: Conspiracy Theories in and about Europe. Routledge, 1-21.
Peels, R. (2023). On defining ‘fundamentalism’. Religious Studies, 59(4), 729-747.
Steiner, K., & Önnerfors, A. (2018). Expressions of Radicalization. Global Politics, Processes and Practices.Palgrave Macmillan.
Tobias Möritz from Leipzig, Deutschland, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Collective action research often centres around adolescents and younger adults while the focus on older people’s activism remains scarce (Schwarz, 2022). However, there are many movements that have been sprouting in various countries within and outside Europe “questioning the supposed passiveness associated with older people” (Blanche-T. & Fernández-Ardèvol, 2022, p. 10). What they have in common is that they are organized around a generational identity which becomes apparent in the names of their movement: “Iai@flautas” (iai@, Catalan term for grandparent), “Grannies Against the Right” (Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland), “Raging Grannies” (USA) or “Polish Grannies” (Poland). However, it is not used to fight for their specific generational causes, but it rather creates a “concomitant “family narrative” of generativity, that is, of caring for the younger generations” (Schwarz, 2022, p. 102). In this intergenerational solidarity, they are able to pass on their experiences with democracy which also becomes evident in the following interview with a grandma against the right activist. Tellingly, there are some parallels among these movements although they have risen on different grounds, in different places, at different times.
Grandmas against the Right is a civil society, non-partisan association initially founded in Austria in 2017 in response to a shift to the right following the election of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and the right-wing populist Freedom Party. Later, similar groups have emerged in Germany, Italy and Switzerland. In this interview, I talk to an activist from the German “Grannies Against the Right” who has decided to remain politically active after her retirement. With many years of experience in political youth work, she has founded a new local group together with a friend. In this interview, she shares her motivations and challenges of her engagement and her wishes for the future of the initiative. She emphasizes the importance of taking action against right-wing tendencies, even in retirement, and describes how the group aims to have an impact not only in its immediate surroundings, but also across cultural and social groups, through courageous and unconventional approaches.
How did you get involved with Grannies Against the Right?
After I retired, I looked for opportunities to get involved as I did not have the time when I was working at the school. What I did there was exhausting enough and also very time-consuming. My experiences in youth education work and my political involvement during my student days motivated me to remain active in retirement. I first came into contact with politics as a student through the student union executive committee, the student council and all the demonstrations that took place there. That was a formative time for me in terms of my attitude and values. Among other things, I became aware of the “Omas gegen Rechts” (grannies against the right) through the newspaper. I was very taken with the idea that the “Omas gegen Rechts” are clearly against the right but are not affiliated with any political party. I found it very appealing that there should be such a broad cross-section of different political views. Together with a long-time friend, we founded our own group in our hometown after taking part in another local group. That was very exciting and was not that long ago. In the meantime, a group of 20 members has come together.
How is your local group composed?
Some of us already knew each other, as the first group meeting consisted mainly of women we had spoken to personally – friends, colleagues or acquaintances. As we also announced it in the local newspaper, some came who were not directly from our professional field, but whom we knew from the local area or through previous initiatives. With every announcement in the press and our presence at events, the group continued to grow, so that we have now expanded beyond the circle of close friends and became more diverse. This diversity naturally entails different biographical backgrounds, which we see as an enrichment. While it can be more familiar and informal in a group with similar life stories, it is also more restrictive. Discussions are often more or less rehearsed. On the other hand, it becomes more diverse when women join who have previously done something completely different, and we would like that too. We would like to reach even more women from different social and cultural groups.
Do you also get in touch with other generations?
Before the European elections, for example, we held conversations at train stations and bus stops, before or after school with adolescents. We tried to engage with the adolescents in conversations about the elections and passed on a pamphlet if we felt that the conversation was leading to something. The experience was positive: we were not treated unkindly, which created a good basis for exchange. One person even said she would pass on the letter to his class. We want to continue this experience, especially at secondary schools, where we thought about conducting workshops. Our aim is to talk about democratic values and share experiences in a friendly atmosphere, without lecturing or giving guidelines. We want to raise awareness and emphasize the importance of democracy without excluding justified criticism of social realities. We ourselves also have this criticism of social realities and politics. It is not the case that we agree with everything that happens, even if it is decided and implemented by democratic parties. It is important that we are transparent about that in the school context. We are not yet sure how we will contact schools, whether we will use exhibitions as an opportunity for discussion or find a cooperation with already existing initiatives. In other places, there are already collaborations with elementary schools and daycare centres, engaging with books about diversity and tolerance. In addition to schools, we would also like to be present at demonstrations and events in the city and work together with other initiatives, for example on specific days of remembrance. Our contacts from our professional background offer many opportunities to get involved here.
How are you perceived from the outside?
We do not have that much experience in the group yet, but the response at previous events has been very positive and we were able to attract new people interested in our next group meeting. Of course, we sometimes come across people who have completely different opinions, especially those who hold conspiracy ideas. In such cases, it is difficult to be perceived positively. Nevertheless, we have learned how to start a conversation in such cases. It is not necessarily about changing someone’s opinion but fostering an exchange that moves away from an aggressive tone and makes it possible to talk about backgrounds and motives. At the same time, we have also received a lot of encouragement. Many people tell us that they think what we do is important, even if they do not want to participate themselves. Also, the municipality supports our initiative and actively approaches us to cooperate with us.
What does this engagement mean to you personally?
It is definitely a good feeling not to stand idly by and watch the reports on TV or in the media and think, “this is getting worse and worse.” In the past, people might have thought that the AfD (“Alternative for Germany”) would disappear at some point. But that has changed, and the party is very persistent. I also find it a bit difficult that the focus is often placed on the East, while similar problems also exist here in the West. However, we actually have a more comfortable situation in western Germany, as we can fall back on existing contacts and initiatives that defend democratic values in a similar way to us. In East Germany, the commitment is often more dangerous, as right-wing activities have become more established there, as other granny groups report. Especially in the run-up to the state elections, there is therefore a desire for support in the region. The whole thing has also changed my attitude. I have always believed that greater vigilance in the 1930s could have helped prevent the rise of fascism. Today I see the system, the connections and the power behind it and understand how challenging it is to counteract it. That is why I think we all need to take action.
What do you wish for the future of Grannies Against the Right?
I would like our group to be braver and dare to surprise people with a cheeky and colourful appearance. At the moment, we are still a fairly serious group, but I think it would be important to be unexpected and perhaps even a little crazy – something that is not normally expected of grannies. This approach has also often been successful in my work at school because it makes people think and shakes up their expectations. I hope that we in our group will find the courage to present ourselves to the public in a planned but surprisingly creative way.
I also hope that we can reach out to refugees and migrants and integrate them into our group in order to become more culturally diverse. This is the only way we can reach out to other population groups and spread our messages, initiatives and activities more widely in society.
Sources
Blanche-T., D., & Fernández-Ardèvol, M. (2022). (Non-)Politicized Ageism: Exploring the Multiple Identities of Older Activists. Societies, 12(2), 40. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc12020040
Schwarz, C. H. (2022). Collective memory and intergenerational transmission in social movements: The “grandparents’ movement” iaioflautas , the indignados protests, and the Spanish transition. Memory Studies, 15(1), 102–119. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698019856058
Tallinn landscape.
Source: https://erc-pact.eu/media/#tallinn
The recent academic conference held in Tallinn from September 25 to 27, 2024, brought together scholars to discuss the intricate interplay between populism, conspiracy theories, and the ongoing war against Ukraine. This gathering was part of PACT´s (Populism and Conspiracy Theory), last transfer conference and not only shed light on the rising prominence of conspiracy theories in contemporary politics but also examined their implications within democratic frameworks. While not directly linked to my own research topic, these discussions sparked valuable and modern questions, easily translatable to any field of contemporary research. Below is a summary of a few key discussions and findings from the event.
On the first day, Scott Radnitz opened the conference with a thought-provoking presentation titled “The Mainstreaming of Conspiracy.” He argued that while belief in conspiracy theories may not be increasing, their normalization within political discourse is evident. Candidates, parties, and movements now feel comfortable endorsing these theories, often using them as tools for transgression, authenticity, and to shape political identity.
Radnitz posited that conspiracy theories serve more as reflections of societal critiques than as factual assertions. Politicians like Trump and Putin exemplify this phenomenon, as they harness conspiratorial rhetoric to resonate with voters’ frustrations. However, he cautioned that while conspiracy theories may gain traction, they can alienate certain voter segments, illustrating the complexity of their appeal in various contexts, such as Kyrgyzstan and pre-invasion Ukraine.
In the following panel, chaired by Massimo Leone, scholars explored the symbolic links between populism and conspiracy theories. Giacomo Loperfido examined the Italian 5 Stars Movement, revealing its evolution from an informal collective against established parties to a more structured entity. This transformation illustrates how populist movements can both embrace and expel radical ideas as they seek legitimacy.
Simona Stano analyzed how figures such as Bill Gates have become scapegoats within conspiracy narratives, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The intertwining of conspiracy theories with social media, celebrity endorsements, and memes demonstrates how certain narratives take root in public consciousness, creating powerful archetypes of ‘elite’ villains.
Itai Siegel‘s research into the Netherlands highlighted the struggles of democratic actors confronting conspiracy rhetoric. Through interviews with civil servants, he found that responses varied significantly, revealing a duality in approach: some aimed to understand the underlying motivations of conspiracy believers, while others adopted a more rigid stance, viewing conspiracy theories as extremist threats. This illustrates the challenge democracies face in addressing conspiratorial thinking without undermining democratic principles.
As discussions continued, the focus shifted to the impact of propaganda on polarization. The second panel examined how conspiracy theories act as multimodal drivers of division within societies. A collaborative study by researchers from the University of Amsterdam explored how Russian disinformation has been appropriated by Dutch conspiracy communities, revealing a complex interplay of literal and cultural translations of propaganda.
In this panel, I had the opportunity to hear my colleague Heidi Piva‘s presentation on radicalization processes in European Telegram groups, on which she wrote an interesting blog post.
On the second day, the focus shifted to the relationship between populism, denialism, and trust in democratic institutions. Research by Susana Salgado and colleagues revealed that supporters of populism are more likely to express distrust in political systems and exhibit belief in conspiracy theories. This connection raises questions about the future of democracy in contexts where distrust and conspiracy thinking become normative.
Massimo Leone’s innovative discourse on “stochastic populism” compared the nature of timekeeping to knowledge creation, emphasizing the need for constant calibration in understanding truth and reality. His insights on the role of technology, particularly AI, in amplifying electoral noise added a contemporary layer to discussions on trust and governance.
The final panels explored the ramifications of conspiracy theories within the context of the Russian war against Ukraine. Scholars such as Andreas Ventsel and Daria Khlevnyuk discussed how historical narratives and conspiracy thinking have shaped Russian nationalist rhetoric surrounding the conflict. They illustrated the strategic use of conspiracy theories to justify aggressive actions and frame the conflict within a broader historical context.
Oksana Belova-Dalton and Anastasiya Astapova examined the dynamics of conspiracy theories among Russian-speaking communities in Estonia, highlighting how the war has exacerbated existing divisions and fostered a climate of mistrust.
To conclude, the Tallinn conference illuminated the profound effects of conspiracy theories on contemporary politics, particularly in the context of populism and conflict. As conspiratorial thinking becomes more mainstream, it poses significant challenges for democratic societies striving to maintain integrity and trust. Understanding the narratives that shape public perception will be crucial in addressing the complex relationship between politics, identity, and belief systems in an increasingly polarized world.
While the discussion rang the end note of the PACT project, it´s food for thought will long outlive it as it served as a critical and nuanced reminder of the need for vigilance in protecting democratic values against the tide of conspiracy-driven rhetoric. As scholars and practitioners continue to analyze these dynamics, the implications for the future of democracy remain ever more pressing.
The appeal of radical groups often lies in creating a strong sense of belonging and a possibility of identification with other group members (Ebner, 2017). Extremist movements often thrive on societal divisions and grievances to promote a narrative of cultural and racial superiority, offering simple solutions to complex issues and cultivating a sense of belonging among their members. Forming interpersonal relationships and being a part of a group are essential aspects of human life. However, it might be harder to experience a sense of belonging for those ostracized by their communities for not fulfilling their roles or for those who are socially marginalized based on their social identities. It can attract these individuals to seek social connection and acceptance elsewhere and a sense of belonging is often emphasized as a pull factor that can drive people to join extremist groups. When journalists ask former extremists how they joined jihadist groups or far-right groups, it usually only takes a few minutes before they mention that they were ‘in search of belonging’ or ‘looking for community’ (Amarasingam, 2024).
Yet, the community aspects are often implied rather than explicitly analyzed in scientific research. One of the few studies that engage with the literature on ‘sense of community’ is the one conducted by Willem De Koster and Dick Houtman (2008). They found that Dutch right-wing extremists who experienced stigmatization in offline social life regarded the Dutch branch of the international Stormfront forum (the largest right-wing extremist internet forum in the Netherlands) as an ‘online refuge,’ where they could experience a sense of community. The authors point out that part of the value of extremist online communities is that it allows individuals to feel like they are part of a broader ‘embattled’ sub-group whose members are linked transnationally and undergo the same struggle. Additionally, Bowman-Grieve (2009) found that Stormfront members place themselves in vulnerable psychological and emotional positions as they recount how they found the far-right movement, openly discuss struggles in their own lives, and talk about how this online community has provided them with a safe space of support.
Some researchers suggest that the online space serves as a platform for ‘identity experimentation,’ where individuals can freely express themselves behind the anonymity of a username. This allows them to say things they wouldn’t in public and adopt personas that differ significantly from their real-world identities, essentially putting on an act or wearing a mask that hides their true selves. However, for members of extremist groups, the opposite is often the case. An IS supporter from the United Kingdom, interviewed by Amarasingam (2024), expressed that his online community is equivalent to his ‘whole life’ and that he never felt like he belonged anywhere except within that community. He also said: “Sometimes it’s like the person online is the real you”. For extremists, it is often in their interactions with their families, at school, or at work where they are putting on an act and not being their true selves – sometimes for the simple reason that they do not want to be ostracized or arrested for being a ‘jihadist’ or a ‘neo-Nazi’. But online, they become part of a likeminded collective, a transnational brotherhood and sisterhood that truly understands them.
There is psychological evidence suggesting that the need for belonging is strong enough for individuals to accept the goals of a group as their own, and it seems that organizations such as Islamic State have exploited this mechanism in their propaganda, calling for the union of all Muslims, regardless of race and ethnicity (Khader, 2016). This allows them to appeal to those who do not experience such acceptance in their own communities. Despite that, the importance of community for individuals who are radicalizing in the online space is still relatively understudied (Amarasingam, 2024). While numerous articles mention ‘online community’ or ‘virtual community’ in passing, there are only a handful of studies that truly unpack the concept or explore its significance in the field. Recently, this area of research has begun to receive further attention and is increasingly seen as an important field that needs further investigation.
Extremism studies should integrate existing research on the sense of community to see if extremist communities are somehow unique. Also, an important research question would be to explore whether extremist communities online are providing individuals with the much-needed sense of belonging that, according to research on modern community trends, is slowly being lost in our everyday life (Amarasingam, 2024; Putnam, 2000).
Amarasingam, A. (2024). Belonging is just a click away: Extremism, radicalisation, and the role of online communities. In The Routledge Handbook on Radicalisation and Countering Radicalisation (pp. 196-212). Routledge.
Bowman-Grieve, L. (2009). Exploring “Stormfront”: A virtual community of the radical right. Studies in conflict & terrorism,32(11), 989-1007.
De Koster, W., & Houtman, D. (2008). ‘STORMFRONT IS LIKE A SECOND HOME TO ME’ On virtual community formation by right-wing extremists. Information, Communication & Society, 11(8), 1155-1176.
Ebner, J. (2017). The rage: The vicious circle of Islamist and far-right extremism. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Khader, M. (2016). Combating violent extremism and radicalization in the digital era. IGI Global.
Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon and Schuster.
Heidi Campana Piva, at the 3rd International Conference of PACT: "Conspiracy Theories, Populism, and the War Against Ukraine: Manifestations and Consequences" – September 25, 2024, Tallinn (Estonia).
INTRODUCTION
Essentially, medical conspiracy theories “depict medical, science or technology-related issues as under the control of secretive and sinister organisations” (Lahrach, Furnham 2017: 89), advocating that malevolent “motivations underpin everything from vaccination campaigns to cancer treatment” (Grimes 2021: 1). Although Medical conspiracy theories have been “a problem since before the dawn of social media” (Ibid), it is unquestionable that the Internet has provided an amplification to this issue. Even before the pandemic, when the gravity of this problem became most evident (Ibid), the digital spread of disinformation had already shown alarming consequences for the acceptance of medical science, especially when it comes to anti-vax propaganda.
Already in 2019, the WHO (2019) declared “vaccine hesitancy” as one of the top-ten threats to global health. Since “Medical conspiracy theories directly contradict evidence-based scientific research” (Lahrach, Furnham 2017: 89), belief in this type of conspiracy theory leads people to reject modern mainstream medicine (Ibid; Douglas et al. 2019: 3), the consequences of which can be severely life-limiting and harmful (Grimes 2021:2). Under these circumstances, the case of the anti-vax movement is especially concerning, seeing how the online spread of disinformation contributed to the worldwide decrease of vaccine uptake, consequently leading to the comeback of diseases that had been virtually cured in the past (Douglas et al. 2019: 4; Grimes 2021: 2).
Many controversies led to the widespread of anti-vax conspiracy theories, ever since the very beginning when vaccines were first being developed. What eventually became one of the main pillars of the anti-vax movement was the publication of an article in 1998 by gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield that suggested a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to the development of autism (Stano 2020: 488; Sherwin 2021: 559). Even though in the following years Wakefield’s research was investigated and found to be irresponsible, dishonest, and fraudulent (in the words of the UK General Medical Council), the anti-vax movement had already gained traction, so much so that by 2002 “immunisation rates dropped below 85 per cent” (Stano 2020: 489). Progressively, the phenomenon of the anti-vax movement “extended beyond Wakefield’s case, making social networks key actors in the rise and spread of forms of anti-vaccine conspiracionism online” (Ibid, 491). Social media has thus become, as frequently cited in academic studies, a “source of vaccine controversy” (Grant et al. 2015: 2). Thriving in this ambient, anti-vax conspiracy theories have become resilient, persisting despite all efforts to eradicate them, even progressively gaining more support.
Considering this relevance, this brief presentation aims to analyse social media posts with the help of digital humanities methodologies, seeking language patterns that can potentially assist in the codification of cultural meanings and in the formation of ideological clusters of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists online.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Unfortunately, I am unable to share the name of the Telegram group from which I obtained my data, as it is sensitive information protected by the GDPR. What I can say is that the group’s description states that it is an “Anti-New World Order” channel. The “New World Order” is a term that is common for many conspiracy theories which describe a secretly emerging authoritarian/totalitarian political elite that seeks to replace all sovereign nation states with a one-world government.
The data that I obtained from the group was the textual (non-pictorial) content of messages sent from its administrator to the channel’s subscribers (which are a total of 25.1 thousand accounts). Only messages containing the string of characters ‘vacc’ somewhere in its text were collected (thus including words such as ‘vaccine’, ‘vaccines’, ‘vaccination’, ‘anti-vaccine’, etc). Messages were collected from 1st July 2023 to 1st June 2024, manually, totalling 9 messages. My intention is to automate this process in the future, so that a larger amount of texts may be easily collected.
The data was compiled on a .txt file, which was then uploaded to Voyant – an open-source web-based text reading and analysis environment which was designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practices for digital humanities students and scholars.
After uploading the dataset to Voyant, this is the panel I was working with:
PRELIMINARY RESULTS
I explored some of Voyant’s available tools that could help me in identifying language patterns, starting with the ‘TermsBerry’, which shows the most common terms of the text and their closeness to each other:
By hovering the mouse over a term, the words that are closely related to it in the text light up. The stronger the colour, the more times these two terms appear together. For example, the strongest correlatives of ‘vaccines’ (figure on the bottom left) are: ‘containment’, ‘covid’, and ‘measures’, while weaker (but still relevant) correlatives are: ‘immune’, ‘excess’, ‘deaths’, and ‘trend’. The relevant correlatives for ‘vaccine’ (singular) (top left figure) are: ‘camps’ (alluding to the idea of ‘vaccination camps’), ‘banned’ and ‘people’ (connected to the victimization of nonvaccine individuals), ‘covid’, ‘linked’, ‘theories’, ‘warned’ (related to how conspiracy theories seek to warn people of dangers that only those capable of observing hidden connections can see), and ‘swabs’ (code for the act of ‘getting vaccinated’).
Interestingly, the strongest correlatives of ‘vaccination’ (top right) are: ‘covid’, ‘response’, ‘lockdown’, ‘true’, ‘motivation’, ‘saving’, and ‘lives’. Interpreting these results require caution. Do these relate to somehow the idea of vaccines as saving people’s lives? By looking at the correlatives of ‘destroyed’ it is possible to see: ‘businesses’, ‘white’, ‘people’, and ‘lives’. This tool does not provide for negation, which means that correlates will appear even if the meaning of the sentence is negative.
To investigate this further, we may take a look at another tool, called ‘Contexts’:
Here it is possible to see all occurrences of terms containing the string ‘vacc’ in the dataset as well as what precedes and what follows each occurrence in the text. Reading the context allows to confirm (or disproof) the analysis of the results of the correlatives, in a way that it is possible to be sure that the discourse in the texts do not see vaccines or the lockdown as measures taken to save lives, focusing instead on the side-effects and on the notion of these measures as being harmful. It is important to note that reading the context of each occurrence is only possible while dealing with such a small dataset (including only 11 occurrences from a total of 9 messages). The bigger the dataset, the more difficult it becomes to check the context for each analysed word and meaning.
Finally, it is worth mentioning the tool ‘Bubblelines’:
This graph shows the occurrence of selected terms (in this case, ‘vacc*’, ‘covid’, ‘scandemic’, ‘lives’, ‘saving’, and ‘people’) over the course of the txt file – and, since it contains the messages in order of post, it also reflects passage of time. We can see that ‘covid’ (dark green) and ‘vacc*’ (light green) appear together most of the times, therefore the discourse surrounding vaccination in the channel mostly regards the covid vaccine and not other kinds. Considering the messages were collected between 2023 and 2024, one could suppose that would not necessarily be the case, and yet it appears so. Another interesting result points to the occurrences of the term ‘scandemic’ spread across the timeline, which I previously supposed it would coincide with the occurrences of Covid but that did not. Rather, the graph suggests the terms are used almost interchangeably, which may indicate that ‘scandemic’ is used as code for the ‘covid pandemic’.
DISCUSSION & FINAL REMARKS
One notion is commonly echoed in the literature: that conspiracy theories are strongly related to the complexities of living under conditions of uncertainty (mainly around values, morals, and identity), as well as fear and confusion that accompany these contemporary crisis-filled periods of socio-cultural upheavals, when epistemic conventions erode, in the risk-saturated, overly-connected, globalized world of late-capitalism (Douglas et al. 2019; Harambam 2020; Lee 2020; Butter & Knight 2020; Leone et al. 2020).
Medical conspiracy theories “are widely known, broadly endorsed, and highly predictive of many common health behaviours”, in a way that their belief “arises from common attribution processes” rather than from psychopathological conditions (Oliver, Wood 2014: 818). The anti-vax movement, more specifically, is not restricted to any single political inclination (Avramov et al. 2020: 521). Besides, it is possible to affirm that belief in medical conspiracy theories and vaccine hesitancy are not likely to be binary, but rather (much like radicalisation), exist “on a spectrum, which can be readily influenced by several mechanisms” (Grimes 2021: 2).
As meaning-making mechanisms, conspiracy theories reduce complexity, suggesting “simplistic and opaque relationships between causes and effects or inputs and outputs” (Önnerfors & Krouwel 2021: 254). This may seem paradoxical, since “some conspiracy theories appear complex on the surface”, possessing layers of interconnected elements and assumptions, however, “in the end most conspiracy theories make a relatively black-and-white assumption of an all-evil conspiracy stopping at nothing to pursue malevolent goals” (Krouwel & van Prooijen, 2021, p. 29). Producing its own evidence, they bring about coherence from a disordered social reality (Amlinger 2022: 262), establishing “a pseudo-rationality (particularly related to presumed causalities) while addressing emotions such as fear and blame within a simplified ethics of good and evil” (Önnerfors & Krouwel 2021: 254).
Therefore, it is possible to say that conspiracy theories carry out “epistemic search for hidden realities” aiming “to give meaning to the gaps in perception” through causal determination that is, however, incongruent with reality (Amlinger 2022: 264). This way, sense is “created in a situation of existential fragility”, where the feelings of powerlessness are warded off by the idea of taking back control (Steiner & Önnerfors 2018: 33), since “simple and straightforward beliefs about society foster people’s sense that they understand the world, which helps them regulate such negative feelings” (Krouwel & van Prooijen 2021: 29).
The dichotomic style of processing characteristic of conspiracy theories manifests inflexible convictions that are also innate to extreme political ideologies, leading to “a pessimistic view about the functioning of society, independent of whether it is extremism on the right or on the left” (Thórisdóttir et al. 2020: 307). According to Önnerfors and Krouwel (2021: 263), it is the “omnipresence of doom scenarios” and “absence of a positive political project for the future” that promote fertile ground for conspiracy belief.
As means of conclusion, considering this work is still in-progress, I can state that there are still methodological issues, namely the fact that as data amount increases, it becomes more difficult to avoid loss of context, opening the analysis for the possibility of misinterpretation. This is still a challenge that I am not sure how to resolve, however, I still believe there is much need for the development of such methodology, since when it comes to social media, scholars need to work with increasingly larger texts.
REFERENCES
Amlinger, C. (2021). Men make their own history: Conspiracy as counter-narrative in the German political field. In: Hristov, T., Carver, B., & Craciun, D. (Eds.), Plots: Literary Form and Conspiracy Culture. Routledge, 179-199.
Avramov, K., Gatov, V., & Yablokov, I. (2020). Conspiracy theories and fake news In: Butter, M., Knight, P. (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. Routledge, 512-524.
Butter, M. & Knight, P. (2020). Introduction. In: Butter, M., Knight, P. (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. Routledge, 304-316.
Grant, L., Hausman, B. L., Cashion, M., Lucchesi, N., Patel, K., & Roberts, J. (2015). Vaccination persuasion online: a qualitative study of two provaccine and two vaccine-skeptical websites. Journal of medical Internet research, 17(5), e133.
Grimes, David 2021. Medical Disinformation and the Unviable Nature of COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0245900, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0245900
Harambam, J. (2020a). Conspiracy Theory Entrepreneurs, Movements and Individuals. In: Butter, M., Knight, P. (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. Routledge, 278-291.
Krouwel, A., & van Prooijen, J. W. (2021). The new European order? Euroscepticism and conspiracy belief. In: Önnerfors, A., & Krouwel, A. (Eds.), Europe: Continent of Conspiracies: Conspiracy Theories in and about Europe. Routledge, 22-35.
Lahrach, Y.; Furnham, A. (2017). Are modern health worries associated with medical conspiracy theories?. Journal of Psychosomatic Research 99, 89-94, DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychores.2017.06.004
Lee, B. (2020). Radicalisation and conspiracy theories. In: Butter, M., Knight, P. (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. Routledge, 304-316.
Leone, M., Madisson, M., & Ventsel, A. (2020). Semiotic Approaches to Conspiracy Theories. In: Butter, M., Knight, P. (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. Routledge, 43-55.
Oliver, E. & Wood, T. (2014). Medical Conspiracy Theories and Health Behaviors in The United States. JAMA Internal Medicine, 174(5), 817-818.
Önnerfors, A., & Krouwel, A. (2021). Between Internal Enemies and External Threats; How conspiracy theories have shaped Europe – an introduction. In: Önnerfors, A., & Krouwel, A. (Eds.), Europe: Continent of Conspiracies: Conspiracy Theories in and about Europe. Routledge, 1-21.
Sherwin, B. D. (2020). Anatomy of a conspiracy theory: Law, politics, and science denialism in the era of COVID-19. Tex. A&M L. Rev., 8, 537.
Stano, S. (2020). The Internet and The Spread of Conspiracy Content. In: Butter, M., Knight, P. (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. Routledge, 483-496.
In June of this year, two attacks took place in the Northern Finnish city of Oulu 6 days apart. The first involved the stabbing of a 12-year-old boy of immigrant background by an adult man with known connections to the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM). The second involved the stabbing of an adult man, also of immigrant background, this time by a 15-year-old boy in what was suspected to be a ‘copycat’ action of the first attack. Both attacks received substantial media coverage within Finland, and several government ministers made statements in response. This blogpost will examine these statements to unearth some of the ways in which ‘right-wing extremism’ is problematised in Finnish political discourse.
The theoretical basis of this post is what Foucault (1977: 186) called ‘thinking problematically’. To ‘think problematically’ is to problematise a concept – in this case ‘right-wing extremism’ – to demonstrate that it is a construct within political discourse rather than something that exists ‘out there’ as an objective phenomenon that we can discover (Jarvis, 2022). My purpose here is not to ‘deny the reality’ of these attacks nor suggest that they didn’t have concrete, traumatic impacts on their victims and emotional impacts on many people of colour living in Finland – including myself. My purpose is rather to demonstrate that how we think about things, and thus respond to them, is never inevitable, and in doing so, to open up ways of thinking about, and responding to, things differently. The Oulu attacks could be, and indeed were, problematised in several different ways, and this matters because what the problem is represented to be determines what the possible solutions are (Bacchi, 2009). And the ‘solutions’ can have significant impacts on far more people than were directly impacted by the attacks themselves.
On the day of the attack, the Deputy Prime Minister Rikka Purra, of the far-right Finns Party, tweeted: ‘With street crime, gangs, etc., we are unfortunately following the same trend as in other countries. The government is working, but it is horrible what it is already like in this country!’. The next day, after it was confirmed by police that the attacker had a neo-Nazi background, Purra (sort of) corrected herself, tweeting: ‘Extremism, drugs, robberies, gangs – the problems are growing. We must take the deterioration in security seriously, increase penalties and stop shying away from violence of all kinds’. Minister of the Interior Mari Rantanen, also of the Finns Party, tweeted: ‘Violence in general is totally unacceptable, but violence against children is inexcusable. Not to mention the horror that the motive apparently comes from extremism’. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, of the right-wing National Coalition Party (NCP), tweeted: ‘Far-right violence is a real threat in Finland. There is no room for extremism of any kind in this country. The government is determined to combat extremism and violence’. The same day, Orpo was also interviewed by the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat, where he said: ‘This has to be taken very seriously. Also extreme movements on the left. All extremism is reprehensible’.
We can identify three main ways in which the first Oulu attack was problematised by government ministers. Firstly, as a ‘street crime and gangs’ problem, secondly, as a problem of a ‘deterioration of security’ and thirdly, as a problem of ‘extremism’.
The first problematisation requires some context. The issue of ‘street crime and gangs’ has been a hot topic in the Finnish parliament in recent years and frequent debates have taken place on the subject. Members of parliament from both the NCP and the Finns have been keen to connect this problem with what they see as a ‘failed immigration policy’ and a ‘lack of integration’ by immigrants, and the solutions that have been proposed have usually been along the lines of limiting immigration and increasing deportations. Within this context, and alongside Purra’s political agenda as leader of the anti-immigration Finns Party, it’s not hard to see why she would have had a political incentive to assume the attack was related to ‘street crime’ and ‘gangs’ before the identity of the attacker had been revealed.
Furthermore, by assuming the attack was associated with ‘street crime and gangs’ – and therefore, by implication, someone with an immigrant background – Purra was continuing a long trend by people in power of associating non-white people with violence. This is not the first time an attack has been wrongly attributed to a non-white person. A famous example is from 2011 when, after the massacre in Norway by a white supremacist, the Wall Street Journal went to press before his identity had been revealed, publishing an editorial in which it was assumed the attacker was a Muslim who had targeted Norway because it was a ‘liberal democracy committed to all the freedoms that define the West’ (Kundnani, 2012: 1). The media plays a central role in representing violence as a problem of non-white people. The sexual abuse of minors scandal of 2018, also in Oulu, for example, was widely reported in Finnish media with articles often emphasising the foreign background of the perpetrators.
Purra’s theory about ‘street crime and gangs’ didn’t last long, because the police revealed that the perpetrator had a background in the neo-Nazi NRM. But her follow up tweet is also interesting. Because rather than retracting her mistake, Purra doubled down – arguing that this attack was just one aspect of a broader ‘deterioration in security’ faced by Finland which also includes ‘extremism’, ‘drugs’, ‘robberies’ and again, ‘gangs’. Now this problem representation is significant because Purra takes a racist attack, connects it to other unrelated crimes to create a broader ‘deterioration of security’ narrative – to which one of the solutions is limiting immigration – and therefore manages to both condemn the attack and, at the same time, fuel a narrative which advocates the same political objectives as the attacker.
What we represent the problem to be determines what the possible solution is. If we represent this attack as a ‘deterioration of security’ then this invites securitising solutions – and that’s exactly what happened. In a press conference following the attack, Mari Rantanen announced her intention to expand police powers, including introducing ‘stop and search’. ‘Stop and search’ is a highly controversial policy which allows police to stop and search individuals in the street, on often tenuous grounds. In the places where it is used, it often disproportionately targets people from ethnic minority backgrounds. In the UK for example, black men are 3.7 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than white men (Home Office, 2024). With an almost exclusively white police force in Finland, there’s good reason to suspect it might be used in a similar way here. Again, we see a racist attack problematised in a way that legitimises a racist response. The communities harmed by the attack end up being the ones who suffer most from the solution.
The third way in which the attacks were problematised was as an act of ‘extremism’. ‘Extremism’ is another popular word in political circles which has its roots in counterterrorism policy after 9/11 and is often used almost interchangeably with ‘terrorism’. But, while ‘terrorism’ usually refers to a method of political violence, ‘extremism’ refers to the ideas and ideologies that supposedly lead someone to violent action. There is very little convincing empirical evidence that violence is caused solely by people’s ideological views and indeed, most people with ‘extreme views’ never commit violent acts. The replacement of ‘terrorism’ with ‘extremism’ means that nowadays, most governments have taken it upon themselves to prevent – not only ‘extremist’ violence – but also the ‘extreme ideas’ that supposedly lead to them. The state has thus moved into monitoring the ‘pre-criminal space’ in a development that is arguably deeply undemocratic.
The ‘extremism’ label also depoliticises. By designating the Oulu attacker as ‘extreme’, Orpo and Rantanen invisibilise his actual politics and their racist, sexist and authoritarian character. And it’s this depoliticisation that enables Orpo to bring the so-called ‘extreme left’ into this discussion, despite them having nothing to do with what took place. The label thus functions similarly to Purra’s invocation of ‘security’ – it’s a way of connecting the Oulu attacks to something that they’re arguably not really connected to. One of the key differences between the so-called ‘extreme right’ and ‘extreme left’ in Finland, is that the former has historically been more prone to direct violence than the latter. If we really think about what the word ‘extreme’ means, it’s just a deviation from the norm, and clamping down on ‘extreme ideas’ thus functions to narrow the window of acceptable political opinion. The ‘extremism’ label can thus be used as a tool to suppress any kind of political dissent and maintain and narrow the status quo. It is not arguably a sufficient basis for defining a security threat (Ford & Jackson, 2023).
6 days later, another very similar attack took place, but this time police suspected that it had what they called ‘racist motive’, and this aspect was reflected in the responses of government ministers. Rantanen tweeted: ‘According to the police, the last stabbing was racially motivated. This has to stop’, while Orpo tweeted ‘There is no place for racism in Finland’. Purra tweeted: ‘According to initial reports, the motive is racist. This is unacceptable’, while President Alexander Stubb also waded in, tweeting: ‘I strongly condemn racism in all its forms. There must be no place for racism or racist violence in Finland’.
Because of the suspicions of the police, we see in the above tweets a unanimous tendency to problematise the attacks as an act of ‘racism’, although the degrees to which that was condemned varied. When an attack has a ‘racist motive’, it is usually considered by police in Finland to be a ‘hate crime’, which is defined as
‘crime targeted at a person, group, a person’s property, institution or a representative of these, motivated by prejudice or hostility towards the victim’s real or perceived ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation, gender identity or appearance or disability’ (Ministry of the Interior, 2020: 88).
This definition of ‘hate crime’ – that such attacks are motivated by ‘prejudice’ or ‘hostility’ on the part of the perpetrator – aligns with what Kundnani (2023) calls ‘the liberal theory of antiracism’ and Henriques (1984) calls ‘cognitivism’. Within this theory, racism is conceived of as an individual problem of irrationally held beliefs and prejudices. Since racism is a product of individual attitudes, the implied anti-racist solution is to change people’s attitudes – by challenging unconscious biases, reducing micro-aggressions, better representation for diverse identities and educating people out of individual prejudices (Kundnani, 2023). According to the liberal theory of racism, it is also an outdated mindset – a ‘remnant of past historical racial situations’ (Bonilla-Silva, 1997: 468) – and, although some individuals still hold racist views, racism at the societal level is generally seen to have been defeated by liberal democracy. This is the commonsense understanding of racism in today’s liberal, Western societies – and it’s the same understanding of racism that Orpo and Stubb evoke when they say ‘there is no place for racism in Finland’.
However, there is a different understanding of racism which has its roots in the thinking of decolonial and abolitionist scholars, many of which came from the Global South. This understanding of racism sees it as an economic and political structure that privileges whites over non-whites in almost every area of life. As Charles Mills writes,
‘racism (or, as I will argue, global white supremacy) is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties’ (Mills, 2022: 3).
Mill’s definition is useful in that, by emphasising the differential distribution of socioeconomic privilege and material wealth, it highlights the relationship between white supremacy and capitalism. Within this understanding, racism or white supremacy can no longer be seen as a relic from the past. Instead, it is a structure that has organised the world for centuries and continues to do so today. It’s the fact that, if you order a taxi or food delivery, you’ll likely be served by a brown or black person – people working precarious, low paid jobs in the ‘gig economy’. It’s the fact that Finnish Somalis were more vulnerable to catching covid because they were more likely to work in customer facing roles such as bus drivers, cleaners and nurses. It’s the fact that the materials in our phones, and the clothes we wear, are produced by people working in slave-like conditions in Global South countries. Prejudiced, racist attitudes are of course still a part of this problem, but crucially they are just one part. Global white supremacy is a far bigger structure – a political and economic system that transcends national borders and shapes most of the world. Problematising it this way implies a need for much bigger solutions than simply educating people out of their prejudiced attitudes. It means completely restructuring – or indeed dismantling – those economic and political systems that maintain the supremacy of whites over non-whites.
So how do we connect this to the Oulu attacks? Structural white supremacy can be easy to ignore if you’re white and live somewhere like Finland where you’re not confronted by its effects every day. The stabbing of a child in a Finnish city is of course much less easy to ignore – and this brings us to an important concept that we haven’t yet problematised: ‘violence’.
The Peace Studies scholar Johan Galtung (1990) thought of violence as having three forms: direct violencewhich can be attributed to an individual perpetrator, structural violence which is built into political systems and manifests as unequal power, life chances and social injustice, and cultural violence (also called ‘symbolic violence’ by others) which is those aspects of ideology and language which can be used to justify direct or structural violence. Galtung (1990: 291) argued that cultural violence makes ‘direct and structural violence look and feel right – or at least not wrong’. Applying Galtung’s framework to white supremacy, we can situate the Oulu attacks as an act of direct white supremacist violence. This kind of violence can be attributed to an individual perpetrator, is often shocking and overt and is generally condemned by politicians – as was the case in the tweets above. But this act of direct violence can be seen as just one dimension of a broader system of white supremacist violence in which the Finnish state – who’s government ministers denounced the attack – is also complicit in.
Structural white supremacist violence in Finland can be seen in the ‘emergency law’ on migration which was voted through just weeks after the Oulu attacks and which was deemed to break European and international asylum law by human rights lawyers. But it can also be seen in the welfare budget cuts which will disproportionately impact people with immigrant backgrounds who are more likely to be on low-income jobs and face discrimination in the job market. Cultural white supremacist violence is seen in the ideology and language used by both the Finns and NCP. Great Replacement Theory for example, the idea that the white native population of Europe is being forcibly replaced by non-whites, has been regularly evoked by ministers in parliament. So too has the idea that Finland’s national identity is under threat, that immigrants are treated more favourably than the majority population and that they are ‘naturally’ prone to violence. These ideas and language, as Galtung described, make the direct violence of the Oulu attack and the structural violence of migration laws and benefits cuts look and feel right – or at least not completely wrong. And in this way, direct, structural and cultural violence are closely connected in a web of linkages and causal flows.
This ‘disconnection’ (Meier, 2024) that is made by politicians between direct white supremacist violence, and the structural and cultural violences they themselves perpetuate, can be seen as an example of what Mills (2022) called white ‘epistemologies of ignorance’. Mills argued that the continuation of structural white supremacy depends on these knowledge systems, writing that:
‘white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement. And these phenomena are in no way accidental, but prescribed by the terms of the Racial Contract, which requires a certain schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity’ (Mills, 2022: 19).
Mills argues that white supremacy relies on racism being framed as a problem of individual attitudes, or occasional acts of direct violence, rather than as a political and economic system. It is these ‘epistemologies of ignorance that allow politicians – like Stubb and Orpo – to say that ‘there is no place for racism in Finland’ when in fact racism and white supremacy are everywhere in Finland and beyond it. At the border, on the street and in the parliament.
Žižek (2008) argues that structural and cultural violence are rendered invisible by direct violence because they sustain the non-violent ‘zero-level’ against which violence is measured, and I would argue that white supremacy functions in a similar way. This doesn’t mean that direct white supremacist violence isn’t real and terrifying, but it does provide an opportunity for the government to invisibilise their own role in maintaining white supremacy by denouncing ‘racism’ and ‘violence’. If we let ourselves believe that this is a problem of ‘deteriorating security’ and ‘extremism’, we find ourselves inviting policies – increased police powers, stop and search, anti-immigration policies and counter-extremism policies against political dissent – that increase structural and cultural white supremacist violence. And that benefits none of us.
References
Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing policy: What’s the problem represented to be? Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson Education.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo (1997), ‘Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation’, American Sociological Review, 62(3): 465–80.
Ford, K. & Jackson, R. (2023). ‘Problematising Radicalisation’ in Lewis, J. R. & Awan, A. N. (eds) (2023) Radicalisation : a global and comparative perspective. London, England: Hurst Publishers.
Foucault, M. (1977). Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews. In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.), D. F. Bouchard, & S. Simon (Trans.). Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Galtung, J. (1990). ‘Cultural violence’, Journal of Peace Research, 27(3), 291–305.
Henriques, J. (1984). ‘Social psychology and the politics of racism’. In J. Henriques, W. Hollway, C. Urwin, C. Venn e V. Walkerdine (Eds.), Changing the subject, psychology, social regulation and subjectivity. London: Routledge.
Jarvis, L. (2022) Critical terrorism studies and the far-right: beyond problems and solutions?, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 15:1, 13-37
Kundnani, A. (2012). “Blind Spot? Security Narratives and Far-right Violence in Europe.” ICCT Research paper.
Kundnani, A. (2023). What is anti-racism: and why it means anti-capitalism. London: Verso.
Meier, AA. (2024): Whiteness as expertise in studies of the far right, Critical Studies on Terrorism.
Mills, C. W. (2022). The racial contract: twenty-fifth anniversary edition. Ithaca, New York : Cornell University Press.
Ministry of the Interior, Finland (2020). NATIONAL ACTION PLAN FOR THE PREVENTION OF VIOLENT RADICALISATION AND EXTREMISM 2019–2023. Internal security | Publications of the Ministry of the Interior 2020: 3.
Žižek, S. (2008). Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. Verso Books: London.
During his inaugural speech for the chair of “Moral questions and political challenges in contemporary societies” at the College de France, on the 30th of March 2023, Didier Fassin offered a reflection on the place of social sciences in times of crisis[1]. This seemed of high interest as radicalization constitutes one of the current readings of the situation as “crisis”. I will try to summarize his speech here while drawing some parallels with the questions of the field of radicalization studies.
Didier Fassin is a doctor of medicine, but also of sociology and anthropology. He is now a member of the College de France, but he has worked in Hong Kong and Princeton, more specifically on crises and public health, which allowed him to become the first social scientist to receive the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award. More generally, his entire career has revolved around a political, scientific and moral commitment to highlighting inequalities, whether in access to health, education or freedom.
This book focuses on the theme of ‘crisis’, a commonly used word that needs further analysis. As he notes, ‘historians, anthropologists or sociologists don’t ask how things should be, but how they actually are’ (p.9). Fassin begins by comparing the lives of two French thinkers, Claude Levi-Strauss and Marc Bloch, both Jews who lived during the Second World War. The former chose to go to the United States, where he concentrated on his study of kinship structures and eventually became famous, while the latter joined the French Resistance and was tortured and shot by the Gestapo in 1944. Both wrote about the war, but one after the events and the other during them.
These two examples illustrate the variety of situations that social scientists encounter “at the moment of danger” (p.18). For Fassin, they show how personal and professional trajectories are strongly influenced by choices, dispositions, contexts and circumstances. He argues that even if the current context is less dramatic than that experienced by Bloch and Strauss, we are currently living in a time of multiple crises, should they be climatic, democratic, of global governance or international relations.
Returning to Anatole Bailly’s definition, he notes that the word “krísis” in Greek refers to “the act of distinguishing, of separating, and the act of deciding, of judging” (p.20), thus combining an analytical and a normative sense. He speaks of a “critical phase” that requires a “critical evaluation”. For him, there is an important link between the words “crisis” and “critic”, both coming from the same origin and one requiring the other. This is very important for the social sciences, since the designation of a “crisis” “tends to suspend or even disqualify the critical sense, in the name of the need to intervene without delay” (p.21). As an example, it is possible to come back to the last attacks in Europe, should they be “islamist” or from the far-right. As said by Emmanuel Valls, French prime minister in 2016, after the Charlie Hebdo shooting, “To explain is to try to excuse a little”[2].
Back to a more theoretical debate, according to Fassin, both Koselleck and Foucault see, in their own way, the signature of (western) modernity in the crisis. However, he claims that they both offer an ethnocentric vision of the concept of “crisis”, which invisibilizes non-occidental and minority populations (racialised, gendered…) and the fact that the Western critique is strongly linked to colonial and imperial expansion. Even today, Fassin notes, Western societies and the “white elite” still seem to be the only ones able to “claim a true radicalism of thought” (p.23). He shows how, in the vein of Edouard Said, even the criticism of colonialism and oppression remains the privilege of the “privileged”.
For the author, this reality creates a huge aporia in the thought on crises, amputating to a large extent even the social sciences, and especially the French ones, of the valuable insights of women, minorities and non-Western populations. For him, W.E.B. Du Bois’s question “What does it feel like to be a problem?” is more relevant than ever in understanding the experience of black and Muslim minorities in Europe. Regarding radicalization studies, this question could also be an interesting starting point to a discussion on causal explanations of the phenomenon.
Returning to our main topic, Fassin quotes Habermas, who states that a crisis always contains an objective and a subjective component. He explains: “It is not enough for society to have a problem; it must also be understood as such […] What we call ‘crisis’ is always a social construct. Whether it is based on facts or not, it needs agents to legitimise it”. (p.26-29).
Here, Fassin takes the example of the 2015 migration crisis, which saw one million asylum seekers arrive in Europe and Austral Africa. While the former was highly publicised and considered “dramatic”, the latter went completely unnoticed. Similarly, the US incarceration crisis, which saw millions of young black men imprisoned, was only criticized when white men started to get affected.
These two examples allow the author to show that, in general, “countries in the South rarely have the authority to impose their own crisis discourse, which can only legitimately come from countries in the North” (p.30).
For the social sciences, therefore, a critique of the crisis consists in highlighting “the abusive use of authority to declare crises without objective reality” (p.31) and “identifying these deprivations of authority that lead to critical situations not being recognized” (p.31).
Indeed, the identification of a situation as a “crisis” is never neutral; it has effects, such as the tightening of border controls for the migration crisis and the normalization of the mistreatment of refugees. It is therefore important for researchers to analyze what the recognition or denial of crises allows or, on the contrary, what it hides. What are the logics of power at work, the strategies used by those in power to impose their vocabulary and interpretations, the tactics deployed by those without a voice to try and resist?
In fact, a “language of crisis” (p.32) is regularly encountered, tending to create affectivity, often fear or empathy, and a temporality of urgency. This urgency produces a consensus around decisionism, which “justifies bypassing the usual legislative, judicial or administrative procedures” (p.33). This is also what seems to be happening in numerous countries where the crisis discourse around radicalization justifies exceptional and sometimes anti-democratic means.
This is where the social sciences have a role to play, as “Naming the crisis, often creates the risk of denying ourselves the opportunity to think it” (p.33), especially as a crisis can often hide another one.
For example, the 2020 covid crisis revealed the “unequal values of life” in the sense that it focused on the importance of defending human life, often overlooking those of prisoners or exiles. Likewise, the American “war on terror” completely hide the link between the attacks and previous American actions in the Middle East.
However, that doesn´t mean that the researcher’s positionality is easy. Indeed, they may be called upon by authorities and organizations to provide their expertise, while at the same time wanting to expose problems that are sometimes linked to these same institutions. For Fassin, “the dividing lines between these different positions and nuances are much more blurred than we thought we could define on the basis of a superficial reading of Max Weber’s supposed ‘axiological neutrality'” (p.35).
For the author, it is now central to reflect on the impact of the “public life of the social sciences” (p.39), where academics are called upon to comment on events, participate in commissions, advise institutions….
This is all the more true as public statements can have direct consequences for the researcher. Fassin recalls the criticism by French and American politicians of some researchers’ findings in recent years, but also, more sadly, the imprisonment and murder of researchers by authoritarian regimes. There is a high risk, he argues, that academics will self-censor or at least avoid sensitive topics.
Fassin concludes by saying that “moral questions” are always linked to “political challenges” and that it is now time for the researcher to plunge into them, “without being swallowed in the ocean of opinions, nor blinded by the shock of events” (p.44), as written by Claude Lefort.
For our topic, this book seems full of lessons and perspectives, evoking both the political strategies linked to the description of an event as a “crisis” and the importance of the researcher’s positionality. It urges us to remain vigilant, especially about what seems to be “ a given”.
[1] Fassin, D., 2023, Sciences sociales par temps de crise, Editions du Collège de France.
Although narratology as an academic discipline has only recently been invented, people have been interested in how we tell stories for millennia (Plummer, 2012). Stories help us understand and make sense of the world around us. They can be personal but also social, collective, belonging to the group. We need stories in order to live a human life, construct, and reconstruct yesterday and tomorrow. They provide us with coherence and meaning and have the capability to turn chaos into order. They also play an important role universally, becoming road maps and key clues to unraveling cultures. On one hand stories can stimulate empathy, create connecting bonds with others, and develop dialogues, and on the other, they can raise challenges, critique, and provoke change.
It would not be possible to achieve a long-lasting change in social structures with the sole use of force and coercion, and without the support of ‘true believers’, who share an objective based on a common story (Harari, 2014). Both far-right and Islamist extremists seem to be aware of that and have been using stories to influence the public and make them act according to the principles of their ideological framework. As Julia Ebner wrote in her book (2017) studying extremism without studying stories is like studying the brain without studying neurons. Narratives have the potential to disseminate extreme ideologies. They serve as the connecting element between non-violent and violent forms of extremism and bridge the ideological spaces between far-right and Islamist extremism. The ex-English Defence League (EDL) community manager, which Ebner interviewed for her book said: ‘Radicalizing people was easy; I just had to tell better stories than the Establishment.’
Ebner (2017) identifies five key elements that contribute to the efficacy of their extremist narratives: simplicity, consistency, responsiveness, identification, and inspiration. Firstly, the simplicity of black-and-white narratives can bring comfort by eliminating the complexities and ambiguities of life. Extremists provide clear and simple answers to complex phenomena observed in our global environment (Ebner, 2017). People are often drawn to simple, binary answers for several reasons such as cognitive ease, certainty, and security, as well as emotional appeal. Complex issues can be difficult to understand and deal with. Binary answers offer a sense of cognitive ease because they provide clear solutions without the need for deep thought or analysis (Fiske & Taylor, 1984; Kahneman, 2011; Korteling et al., 2023) . Such dichotomy also provides a sense of certainty and security in an uncertain world (Fisher & Keil, 2018). It offers clear guidelines and directions, which can be comforting in times of confusion or chaos. Furthermore, simple answers often appeal to people’s emotions, offering straightforward narratives that resonate with their fears, frustrations, or desires. This emotional connection can make binary solutions more compelling than nuanced, complex ones. Although we attempt to structure our understanding of the world through rational analysis, we often rapidly and instinctively engage in emotional binary framing (Kahneman, 2011). Pejorative, fear-based binary framing of the other is the most protective Darwinist response we can have, which keeps us alert and cautious (Bishop, 2023). Evolutionarily derived fear triggers and the cognitive preference for dichotomy do not need to wait for sophisticated arguments.
Secondly, compelling stories are characterized by consistency, which is critical not only in maintaining a coherent and uniform narrative over time to build trust and credibility, but also in ensuring that actions align with the narrative to preserve legitimacy (Ebner, 2017). This consistency can sharply contrast with the often-observed inconsistency within established institutions. When mainstream groups fail to maintain narrative consistency or align their actions with their words, it can foster public distrust. In contrast, groups that maintain consistency can leverage these institutional failures, positioning themselves as more trustworthy or genuine alternatives, thereby attracting those disillusioned with the establishment.
Thirdly, responsiveness refers to the ability to address the grievances and aspirations of the population—issues often neglected by those in power (Ebner, 2017). Extremist narratives often exploit societal dissatisfaction presenting themselves as the solution to perceived injustices and promising radical change. By addressing the concerns of marginalized groups, extremists can gain support and legitimacy, further strengthening their narrative.
Additionally, the appeal of radical groups lies in creating a strong sense of belonging and a possibility of identification with other group members (Ebner, 2017). Homogeneity of the in-group is fostered through common language, customs, and symbols. The narratives often provoke empathy for certain protagonists and hatred for antagonists. For instance, the now archived, Facebook page of the German neo-Nazi terrorist group Oldschool Society, shows pictures of its members hugging each other and celebrating together.
Lastly, the capacity of extremist narratives to inspire action is critical. The successful stories create a desire to resolve a real or perceived conflict (Burke, 1989). Extremists often build on the narrative of victimhood and imply that solving the threat is only possible by eliminating the other, whether metaphorically or literally. The desired ‘happy end’ may involve the annihilation of a race, religion, or a social class, often expected after the ‘final battle’, the ‘inevitable war’, or the ‘final solution’ (Ebner, 2017). This is demonstrated in an extract from the Islamic State’s Dabiq magazine: “We target the crusaders, and we will eradicate and distinguish them, for there are only two camps: the camp of truth and its followers, and the camp of falsehood and its factions” (“A Call to Hijrah,” September 2014).
References
A Call to Hijrah. (September 2014). Dabiq.
Bishop, K. R. (2023). American Binary Thinking: Psychological Foundations, Religious Framing, and Media Reinforcement.
Burke, K. (1989). On symbols and society. University of Chicago Press.
Ebner, J. (2017). The rage: The vicious circle of Islamist and far-right extremism. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Fisher, M., & Keil, F. C. (2018). The Binary Bias: A Systematic Distortion in the Integration of Information. Psychological Science, 29(11), 1846-1858. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618792256
Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1984). Social Cognition. In: Random House, New York.
Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Random House.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. macmillan.
Korteling, J. E., Paradies, G. L., & Sassen-van Meer, J. P. (2023). Cognitive bias and how to improve sustainable decision making. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1129835.
Plummer, K. (2012). A manifesto for stories: Critical Humanist notes for a narrative wisdom. In.
This VORTEX blog post complements the piece ‘Democracy under threat: The increasing normalisation of threats and violence directed at politicians and electoral candidates’ published by Joshua Farrell-Molloy in June. He reported on ‘(a) string of incidents that occurred in Germany and Ireland during May and early June’ and identified this as a ‘worrying trend of mounting hostility and aggression directed towards politicians in what has become an increasingly incendiary political environment’. He also addressed the consequences of these attacks, which are damaging to democracy: Electoral candidates and especially female and non-white candidates ‘risk reducing their democratic participation due to intimidation’. He therefore concludes that ‘defending the democratic process may require installing measures to better protect these elected representatives and candidates from threats and physical harm’. This VORTEX blog post will build on these thoughts in the German context. It will look at some of the figures published on attacks against politicians in Germany to date, giving an idea of the extent of the problem and its development, even if the number of unreported cases is estimated to be high. It will also discuss some of the factors that contribute to this phenomenon such as widespread feelings of being overwhelmed in the face of multiple crises and disappointment with the political handling of these, feelings that can be catered for with enemy images against political actors. A following blog post in October will deal with the consequences of these attacks on those affected, as well as concrete measures that are available and necessary to prevent further damage to the foundations of our democracy.
The number of attacks on politicians in recent years and the rising trend in the number of cases is evident in several sources. The most intuitive, albeit imprecise, source are crime statistics. According to the Federal Criminal Police Office,for example, the number of offences against holders of a political office or mandate tripled from 1527 to 4458 cases between 2017 and 2021. When presenting the number of cases of politically motivated crime in the past year, 2023, the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office spoke of around 5,400 attacks in 2023, an increase of 29% compared to the previous year and also a tripling of attacks within the past five years. However, not everyone affected reports the attack, meaning that many attacks are not even included in these crime statistics. Yet, reporting statistics also show high figures. According to preliminary figures, a total of 2,790 attacks on representatives or members of the parties represented in the Bundestag were reported in 2023. Of these, representatives of Alliance 90/The Greens were most frequently affected in 1,219 cases, representatives of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in 478 cases and representatives of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 420 cases.
The most reliable source for assessing the extent of violence are scientific surveys. Various studies in Germany have focussed on different political offices or placed a particular geographical focus. A few selected studies from the last three years serve as examples. In 2022, the Motra network and its transfer partners published a municipal monitoring study on hatred, hate speech and violence towards municipal officials. Of the 1,495 people surveyed, 46% stated that they had experienced hostility towards themselves or their relatives between May and October 2021. Of these, 70% were verbal or written hostilities, 26% were hate postings and 4% were physical assaults. The respondents themselves experienced direct hostility or attacks in the digital space once or twice a month. According to a representative, nationwide survey of 1,641 mayors commissioned by the Körber Foundation (2020-21), 57% of respondents had been insulted, threatened or physically attacked at least once. Finally, a study conducted by the University of Duisburg-Essen in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation (2022) came to a similar conclusion: 2166 people involved in local government (councillors, mayors and political election officials) in major German cities were surveyed. Around 60% had already experienced hostility or aggression directed at them at least once.
What is behind these high numbers and this increase in violence? There is no simple and all-encompassing explanation. Yet, feelings such as anger or disappointment with current politics and the state are currently widespread and are often the result of multiple and intertwined crisis experiences in recent years. The so-called refugee crisis, coronavirus pandemic, climate crisis or inflation are putting citizens in a situation that makes them dissatisfied and triggers feelings of powerlessness, as their situation is often neither self-inflicted nor is there any possibility of self-efficacy to solve their problems. Expectations that ‘those at the top’ will help to solve their own problems swiftly are disappointed, since there are no such swift solutions. Population surveys show that trust in the state’s ability to act is increasingly declining. According to a 2023 survey, only 27% of citizens still believe that the state is capable of fulfilling its tasks. The key question therefore is how such feelings of powerlessness and dissatisfaction can increasingly lead to hostility and violence against politicians.
One explanatory factor lies in the narratives of populist and right-wing actors, who respond to feelings of being overwhelmed with simple solution narratives and finger-pointing. Threat scenarios are fuelled by right-wing actors via social media and an alleged culprit is identified as an ‘enemy’ that needs to be confronted to improve one’s own situation and prevent worse things from happening. Politicians are increasingly becoming the enemy, as they are the ones who have had to make difficult political decisions in the context of the coronavirus pandemic or refugee crisis. It often becomes less abstract and more personal when local politicians, for example, are held responsible for a decision to open a new refugee centre in their community. The head of the Federal Criminal Police Office recently said commented recently about the politics of right-wing parties that employ such enemy stereotypes: ‘Every political actor who does not contribute to an objective discourse but instead creates scapegoats – the keywords being ‘foreigner problem’ and ‘remigration’ – contributes to this polarisation.’
Echo chambers on social media and a continuous stylisation of scapegoats can cause individuals to see verbal and, in the worst cases, physical violence as a legitimate or even necessary means of resistance or change. How people become radicalised in this way is a complex and non-linear process, but when it leads to violence against politicians, it is essentially based on such enemy images. The aim is then rarely to harm a particular person. On the contrary, as with many acts of violence and especially those that are categorised as extremist, these are signal acts against representatives of a hated political system that are also intended to intimidate others. However complex the individual process leading to violence may be, it usually begins with feelings of powerlessness, which make people susceptible to scapegoating narratives and can lead in one way or another to the conviction that action must be taken against those people, in the case of violence against politicians either individual culprits or abstract representatives of the system (for literature on this topic, see for example Berger 2018, Mølmen and Ravndal 2021 or Herath and Whittaker 2021).
The next VORTEX blog post in October will focus on the consequences of these developments that endanger democracy and describe what measures have already been taken in Germany to counter this phenomenon both preventively and repressively as well as to support those affected.
