Judeo-Christian democracy and the Transatlantic Right: Travels of a contested civilizational imaginary

2021 ◽  
pp. 2336825X2110529
Author(s):  
Vibeke Schou Tjalve
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Christian Democracy ◽  
The Us

“Judeo-Christian civilization” and “Christian democracy” have emerged as darling far Right tropes, seemingly uniting radical conservatives in the US and Europe behind a single, geopolitical imaginary. This article presents a brief political-conceptual story of how “Judeo-Christianity” and “Christian democracy” became a rhetorical meeting ground for radical conservatives across the Atlantic. But it also sheds light on why deep, historical, intellectual, and ethnographic divides beneath, make those grounds highly unstable terrain. Divides not only between European and American traditions of liberalism and conservatism but also between the experiences and practices of state power that inform them. Beneath the slogans of Christian democracy espoused in such disparate contexts as Charlottesville and Budapest, move different legacies, memories, enemies.

Countering Violent Extremism in Canada and Abroad

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora Abdelrahman Ibrahim
Keyword(s):  
Best Practice ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Significant Development ◽  
The Us ◽  
Violent Extremism ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
The Uk

Terrorism and violent extremism have undoubtedly become among the top security concerns of the 21st century. Despite a robust agenda of counterterrorism since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the evolution of global terrorism has continued to outpace the policy responses that have tried to address it. Recent trends such as the foreign fighter phenomenon, the rampant spread of extremist ideologies online and within communities, and a dramatic increase in terrorist incidents worldwide, have led to a recognition that “traditional” counterterrorism efforts are insufficient and ineffective in combatting these phenomena. Consequently, the focus of policy and practice has shifted towards countering violent extremism by addressing the drivers of radicalization to curb recruitment to extremist groups. Within this context, the field of countering violent extremism (CVE) has garnered attention from both the academic and policy-making worlds. While the CVE field holds promise as a significant development in counterterrorism, its policy and practice are complicated by several challenges that undermine the success of its initiatives. Building resilience to violent extremism is continuously challenged by an overly securitized narrative and unintended consequences of previous policies and practices, including divisive social undercurrents like Islamophobia, xenophobia, and far-right sentiments. These by-products make it increasingly difficult to mobilize a whole of society response that is so critical to the success and sustainability of CVE initiatives. This research project addresses these policy challenges by drawing on the CVE strategies of Canada, the US, the UK, and Denmark to collect best practice and lessons learned in order to outline a way forward. 

Geography and State Power

Paper Trails ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 16-35
Author(s):  
Cameron Blevins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
State Power ◽  
Western United States ◽  
Coercive Power ◽  
The Us ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Settler Colonization ◽  
The 19Th Century

Chapter 1 situates the US Post within the larger landscape of the 19th-century American state. Analyzing the geography of the US Post challenges traditional assumptions about how states are organized and the ways in which they exercise power. First, rather than functioning as a centralized bureaucracy, the US Post operated through the agency model: a decentralized organization in which small tasks are delegated to a scattered workforce of part-time local agents. Second, rather than exercising coercive power, the US Post operated through structural power, or the ability to shape the conditions under which people make decisions. Rather than weaknesses, these features were key to how the US Post was able to rapidly expand over recently conquered territory and, in doing so, tie together the machinery of governance and settler colonization in the western United States.

Bat Ye’or and Eurabia

2019 ◽  
pp. 170-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sindre Bangstad
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Us ◽  
Muslim Majority

This chapter discusses the life and work of Bat Ye’or (Gisèle Littman), who is widely seen as the doyenne of “Eurabia”-literature. This comes in different varieties and formulations, but in Bat Ye’or’s rendering refers to an ongoing secretive conspiracy which involves both the European Union and Muslim-majority countries in North Africa and the Middle East, aimed at establishing Muslim control over a future Europe or “Eurabia.” Though Bat Ye’or did not coin the term “Eurabia,” she can be credited with having popularized the concept through quasi-academic titles such as Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis and Europe, Globalization and the Coming Universal Caliphate. Through its dissemination on various “counter-jihadist” websites and in the work of the Norwegian counter-jihadist blogger Fjordman, her work inspired the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. She also has long-standing relations with Serbian ultranationalists, the Israeli Far Right, and various radical Right activists in Western Europe and the US.

Haiti’s National Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 227-254
Author(s):  
Chelsea Stieber
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Literary Magazine ◽  
Intellectual Heritage ◽  
The Us ◽  
Intellectual Production

This chapter considers the National Revolution in 1920s and ‘30s Haiti under the US occupation. The first two sections excavate the heritage of Haiti’s occupation-era far-right nationalism by analyzing the little-studied literary magazine Stella (Cap-Haïtien, 1926–1930). It highlights the poetry and prose works published in the magazine, which the writers situated within the longer Haitian tradition of nationalist, Dessalinean intellectual production: that in order for the nation to heal and achieve unity, it was necessary to plumb the depths of Haiti’s original fractures, its deepest wounds. Yet if the Stella writers placed themselves within an intellectual heritage, they also saw themselves forging a new, radical path for the post-occupation future. A final section argues that Stella’s nationalist writers once again evoked the fracture of 1804/1806—not to mend Haiti’s foundational fractures, but to definitively reject the liberalism of 1806.

Remembering France's glory, securing Europe in the age of Trump

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-44
Author(s):  
Alexandra Gheciu
Keyword(s):  
International Order ◽  
Western World ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Leader ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
The Us ◽  
French Foreign Policy ◽  
The Eu ◽  
Do So

AbstractThese days, when we hear the slogan ‘let's make our country great again’ we almost automatically assume the state concerned is the US, and the leader uttering the slogan is President Trump. This article invites readers to explore the discourse and practices through which another national leader is seeking to restore his country's ‘greatness’ and promote national and international security. The leader concerned is France's Emmanuel Macron. Why focus on the French president? Because since his election he has become the most dynamic European leader, on a mission to enhance France's international stature, and to do so via a broader process of protecting and empowering the EU. More broadly, France stands out as a country whose political leadership has long been committed to the goal of playing a global role. As Pernille Rieker reminds us, ‘Since 1945, French foreign policy has been dominated by the explicit ambition of restoring the country's greatness [la grandeur de la France], justified in terms of French exceptionalism’.1Macron has cast his vision of national/European greatness, security, and international order in opposition to the isolationist, rigidly nationalist visions articulated by his domestic opponents and, internationally, by President Trump. In his view, France and Europe can only be secure if they defeat the illiberal ideas advocated by the increasingly vocal political forces, particularly far-right movements, seeking to undermine the core values and multilateral principles of the post-1945 international order. Under these circumstances, an analysis of Macron's policies and practices of grandeur can help us gain a better understanding of the competition between liberal and illiberal worldviews – a competition that is increasingly pronounced within the Western world.

scholarly journals Climate change denial as far-right politics: How abandonment of scientific method paved the way for Trump

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-60
Author(s):  
Gavin Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
The United States ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Climate Change Denial ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
Democratic Norms ◽  
Trump Administration

In this article I show that the form of argument put forward by the climate change denial movement in the United States (US) closely resembles that used in Nazi Germany with regard to Nazi racial definitions. Each involves a rejection of scientific method. This rejection inherently lends itself to far-right politics, which is a philosophy of prejudice. The prevalence of such a philosophy in contemporary American political culture, exemplified through climate change denial, has arguably opened the door for a president of Trump's type. Nevertheless, the US Constitution is far more difficult to suspend than that of the Weimar Republic. As a result, US institutional safeguards against a philosophy of prejudice are likely to hold against a short-term assault on environmental justice in a way that the Weimar Republic's constitutional order did not against Nazism's assault on civil rights. The greater threat to environmental protection in the contemporary US situation is the slow erosion of democratic norms by the Trump administration.

The functionality of affects: conceptualising far-right populist politics beyond negative emotions

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Leser ◽  
Florian Spissinger
Keyword(s):  
Political Party ◽  
Negative Emotions ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Alternative Für Deutschland ◽  
Negative Affects ◽  
The Us ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Emotional Dynamics

By focusing on negative affects, such as anger, fear and hate, a normative critique of affective politics tends to overlook the ambiguity and situated nature of affective politics. This paper suggests embracing the ambivalences that characterise the emotional dynamics in political arenas; therefore, it emphasises the functionality of affects. The study adopts a post-dualistic understanding of political affects based on the conceptual devices of Sara Ahmed and Kathleen Stewart to analyse the affective practices and performances of the German political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). An ethnographic lens and analytical focus on the affective politics of far-right agents beyond negativity can permit more subtle nuances and highlight potentially overlooked facets of enactment and performance that have contributed to the successes of far-right political organisations in Europe and the US. The paper ultimately argues that the use of ‘ordinary’ affects produces legitimacy, renders far-right politics appealing and contributes to the normalisation of far-right discourse.

Policy scrutiny of far-right women will sharpen

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Operational Effectiveness ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Us

Significance Yet their roles are frequently downplayed. Impacts Growing reliance on online radicalisation will increase the visibility and operational effectiveness of extremist women. Criminal justice responses towards women extremists will harden. Far-right extremists will exploit the #BlackLivesMatter protests and the US elections to recruit more women into white nationalist groups.

The Christian Democracy of A. D. Lindsay

1986 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Maddox
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Theory ◽  
State Power ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Voluntary Association ◽  
World War ◽  
Christian Democracy ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Second World

Much of value in the conception of a democratic state, evident in the work of several English and American scholars writing around the time of the Second World War, but most forcefully presented by A. D. Lindsay, has been overlooked by contemporary scholarship. Lindsay combined a ‘realist’ acceptance of state power with a finely-tuned appreciation of the possibilities of citizenship. His distinctive contributions to democratic theory, focusing on discussion, state power, the sovereignty of the constitution, voluntary association and the creativity of democracy, are well worth re-examination, even if in the end for Lindsay political activism was merely a necessary adjunct to religious faith.

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