Introduction

The past several years has seen increasing violence and unrest from the far-right spectrum globally, both in the pace and impact of mass atrocities and terrorist attacks targeting individuals and groups based on their racial, ethnic, religious, gender, or sexual identities, and in violent protests against government facilities or elected officials. Recent far-right extremist attacks include mass shootings targeting Muslims, Jews, Latinos, Black Americans, Sikhs, and women in the U.S., New Zealand, Germany, Canada, the U.K., Singapore, and Norway, among others. Anti-government attacks include the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the truckers’ convoy and protests in Ottawa, Canada, and anti-Corona protests in Germany, including an attack on the German Reichstag in August 2020.

Contested definitions: “far-right” and “extremism”

There is no agreed-upon definition of the “far right,” either within individual countries or across the globe. Various countries—and agencies or ministries within each country—use terms like right-wing radicalism, right-wing extremism, domestic violent extremism, white supremacist, anti-government, or racially-and ethnically motivated violent extremism, and more. In this essay, I use “far right” as a term that encompasses two major kinds of extremist and terrorist movements.

On the one hand, the far right refers to supremacist movements and groups—most commonly white supremacist extremists, but also male supremacists, Christian supremacists, and Western supremacists, among others. These are groups and movements that establish hierarchies of superiority and inferiority that ultimately dehumanize the ‘other’ and create a sense of existential threat between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that is often met with extreme violence against immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, or others on the basis of religion, sexuality, gender, disability, and more.

On the other hand, the ‘far right’ encompasses anti-government movements that work against the tenets and principles of liberal democracy by promoting authoritarianism or refusing to uphold aspects of democracy like the rule of law or the protection of minority rights. These may take the form of sovereign citizen groups that reject existing governments and their laws, but also manifest as unlawful militias who argue they are defending the country or its constitution. Some of these types of groups exist in other parts of the extremist spectrum as well, including on the far left. Rising anti-government extremism has been evident in a variety of global protest movements, for example, from the 2018 French “yellow vest” movement that began as a protest over diesel taxes to the global Black Lives Matter movement which gained momentum after the murder of George Floyd by a policeman in spring 2020. Far-right anti-government movements distinguish themselves from other anti-government protests because of their authoritarian or anti-democratic basis, their rejection of the authority of the government on legal or tax matters, and their rejection of key principles of inclusive and liberal democracies related to minority rights. Finally, the ‘far right’ typically includes some single-issue extremist groups such as anti-abortion groups and movements. And it holds a starring role within some conspiracy movements that are not exclusively far right, like QAnon.   The term “extremism” also requires an explanation. In both far-right categories identified above—supremacist movements and anti-government movements—there is considerable overlap and influence across groups and movements in the mainstream with those on the fringes. This means that ideas once considered quite extreme—such as Christian nationalist beliefs, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant beliefs, and antisemitic beliefs—have been significantly mainstreamed globally, including in places like the U.S., Italy, Poland, and Hungary. Anti-immigrant and Islamophobic ideas saw considerable mainstreaming in Europe following the 2015 migrant crisis, for example, as reflected in tens of thousands of participants in anti-immigrant PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamification of the Occident) protests, as well as the recent electoral successes of far-right parties in Sweden, Italy, Germany and elsewhere globally. This rapid mainstreaming of far-right ideas requires a definition of extremism that does not rely on its position vis-à-vis the mainstream. Therefore, following the scholar J.M. Berger, I define extremism as a way of us- versus- them thinking that positions the other as an existential threat who must be fought with violence.¹

The global context of far-right violent extremism: Trends and Impact

On nearly every measure we have available, such as rising propaganda, numbers of hate groups and hate crimes, violent plots foiled by intelligence authorities, terrorist violence, and numbers of deaths, the past decade has seen exponential growth in the far right. Global far-right terrorism has grown 250% in recent years, according to the Global Terrorism Index—as illustrated by violent hate attacks and mass atrocities in Oslo, Norway, Christchurch, New Zealand, Halle and Hanau, Germany, and in the U.S. in Charleston, El Paso, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo, among dozens of other attacks globally.

The rise in far-right extremist violence must be understood within a global context that has seen increasing hate more broadly. The problem is much bigger than mass attacks that are officially classified as extremism or terrorism. In the U.S., for example, hate crimes—crimes motivated by bias against race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity—are now at the highest level in 12 years. Advocacy organizations for many marginalized communities have documented spikes or record-breaking reports of antisemitic, Islamophobic, anti-trans, and anti-Asian and Pacific Islander hate.² There is an increasing willingness to see these broader forms of hate-fueled violence as linked to far-right extremism and terrorism that typically comes in the form of mass atrocity attacks. Thus, the Biden administration held a White House Summit in September 2022 called the United We Stand Summit on hate-fueled violence, which was the first time the U.S. linked the issue of hate crimes with supremacist extremist violence and directed resources to address both types of hate-fueled violence simultaneously and in integrated ways.

Rising hate-fueled violence and far-right violent extremism have had a devastating impact on communities across the globe.  The rise of far-right violent extremism has, first and foremost, affected the security and safety of marginalized and targeted members of society—which includes racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, women and the LGBTQI+ community, and migrants and refugees, among others. Researchers have consistently documented a heightened sense of fear, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress syndrome among members of targeted groups as a result of rising hate crimes and mass atrocities directed at members of their identity group.

Rising far-right extremist violence is also taking place within a broader context in which a diverse set of well-documented ills are affecting the strength of liberal democracies. These trends aren’t only due to rising far-right extremism, but these issues create a kind of toxic feedback loop that reinforce and bolster harmful trends that are undermining liberal democracies. This includes rising polarization and moral disengagement and increased support for political violence, as well as declining trust in democratic institutions. It also includes a significant rollback of rights that had been previously accepted as stable in places like the U.S. and Poland—including losses of reproductive rights and attacks on the LGBTQ+ community.

These issues are all amplified by an information ecosystem that fosters problematic behaviors and attitudes. This includes the circulation and spread of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, conspiracy theories, and propaganda—resulting in problematic outcomes like the growth in QAnon followers to the persistent belief in ‘stolen’ elections or false claims about the origins of Covid-19. It also includes a broad range of toxic online subcultures that valorize, trivialize, and gamify mass violence and atrocities. These issues undermine inclusive democracy at its core—and far-right extremism plays a role in all of them.

Countering far-right violent extremism

It is hard to overestimate the outsized impact that 9/11 had on counterterrorism and counterextremism. The infrastructure for the contemporary global effort to counter extremism was built in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. During this period, the United Nations launched its Office of Counterterrorism (UNOCT), the U.S. created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the U.K. launched a series of national prevention programs, including the controversial PREVENT program, among others. Today, most of the global effort to counter terrorism and violent extremism exists in frameworks and structures that were crafted in the post 9/11 period.

This means that for nearly two decades, the global effort to counter and prevent extremism was almost exclusively focused on Islamist and jihadi terrorism. The strategies developed to counter those forms of extremism were designed to exploit specific features of this type of extremism—namely, extremism structured within hierarchical groups with a clear chain of command, ideological basis and attacks whose perpetrators pledged loyalty to a specific group. Counterterrorism efforts thus focused on efforts like infiltration, surveillance, monitoring, and disrupting plots from formal groups, alongside some prison deradicalization initiatives. There was also a significant (and flawed) effort to develop counternarratives.

Overall, this approach made for a heavily securitized approach to counterterrorism and counterextremism. There were clear successes, especially related to the interruption of plots that prevented significant violence; twenty-one terrorist plots were interrupted in the United States in 2020 alone, for example.³  But the securitized approach was also roundly criticized for repeatedly violating civil rights, especially for Muslims, and had a documented impact on reduced trust in government from marginalized groups. These prevention approaches, in other words, contributed to and exacerbated social cohesion deficits that reduced a sense of belonging and trust.⁴

Germany was the major global outlier in this regard, having already launched significant investments in monitoring and prevention of extremism across a variety of sectors. This includes monitoring and data reporting services from Germany’s Office of the Protection of the Constitution. It also includes the post-WWII creation of an independent agency tasked with rooting out extremism in the military, alongside significant investments in community-based, mobile advisory centers to counter right-wing extremism set up in the post-unification period amid a surge in neo-Nazi and right-wing extremist violence. The history of the Nazi regime combined with this post-unification resurgence of violent white supremacist extremism means that Germany now has the most comprehensive and well-developed counterterrorism and counterextremism infrastructure related to the extreme far right. This remains true even though Germany also increased its counterterrorism and prevention efforts related to Islamist and jihadi extremism in the wake of 9/11 and the rise of religious extremism and terrorist attacks in Europe.⁵

But for most of the world, especially across Western countries most affected by the rise of the far right, the securitized approach to countering extremist violence turned out to be a poor fit for far-right violent extremism. Far-right movements are today best characterized as “post-organizational,” meaning that individuals are radicalized and violence is mobilized less through formal group memberships and initiation rites and more through toxic online subcultures with no clear linkages to formal extremist groups. These subcultures are continually evolving across a vast and ever-growing online ecosystem. Counterextremism strategies like infiltration and surveillance of formal groups were no match for this kind of mobilization and the ways it is more meme-based and less manifesto-driven than previous forms of extremist radicalization. And as individuals navigate the hyperlinked information infrastructure online, far-right ideologies themselves have become more muddled and less coherent in ways that have made it harder to respond with traditional counterextremism strategies.⁶

The struggle to adapt counterterrorism and counterextremism strategies created in the post-9/11 era to the far-right threat took on new urgency in the wake of mass atrocities in Christchurch, Pittsburgh, and El Paso. During the Covid-19 pandemic, as the far-right spectrum grew to incorporate new forms of anti-government mobilization against shutdowns and vaccines, alongside spikes in antisemitic conspiracy theories, anti-Asian violence, and increased hate crimes, this sense of urgency and attention to the problem grew. Policy shifts followed rapidly on the heels of scores of national parliamentary and Congressional hearings and briefings. The UN Office of Counterterrorism (UNOCT) held the first hearings on far-right extremism in fall 2019. National strategies to counter domestic violent extremism, far-right extremism or related forms of violence along with significant new investments and a transformed set of strategies emerged in several countries around the globe. For example, the post-Christchurch period led to significant investments in prevention in New Zealand, including the creation of a new national center on diversity, equity and the prevention of violent extremism. Germany announced a one-billion Euro investment in 89 specific measures over a three year period from 2021-2024 to counter racism, xenophobia, and prevent violent extremism in Germany. And in June 2021, the Biden administration issued the first U.S. national strategy on countering domestic violent extremism, followed up with a White House Summit on hate-fueled violence in September 2022 that announced substantial new investments from a broader range of agencies, including education, finance, and health and human services investments.

This flurry of engagement resulted in a growing consensus in the countering violent extremism field across the globe that far-right extremism cannot be addressed with a focus on the fringes only—rather, it requires efforts to build resilience within the mainstream. This means that counterextremism strategies to prevent violence are increasingly integrated with broader domestic policy strategies to counter racism and xenophobia and to improve digital and information literacy in ways that build mainstream resilience to propaganda and disinformation.

This shift represents a sea-change in the global approach to the prevention of violent extremism, which many countries came to describe as a public health approach to addressing violent extremism. Unlike in the post-9/11 era, when the focus of counterextremism was on already-radicalized individuals and organized extremist groups, this new approach advocates for a holistic approach that disrupts and prevents extremism much further upstream, through deep engagement in local communities and primary prevention strategies. Much like the treatment of physical health, a public-health style approach in counterextremism works to educate communities in ways that help individuals make attitudinal and behavioral choices that lead to reduced incidence of bad outcomes—in this case, radicalization or belief in conspiracies, disinformation, and propaganda. Public health approaches can mean many things, however, and it is worth noting that in some cases, the pivot to a public health approach has been superficial. For this reason, it is worth elaborating on what an effective public health approach looks like.

A holistic model for public health prevention of violent extremism

A deep and effective public health approach to preventing violent extremism includes investments at the primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention levels. Primary prevention refers to efforts to address radicalization before it takes root, including through broad civic education and media literacy for the entire population focused on helping the public build resilience to harmful online content, propaganda, or false information.

Secondary prevention refers to efforts to mitigate the impacts of already radicalized people and groups, primarily through surveillance, monitoring, arrest, interruption of plots, barricading of doors, hardening of soft targets, etc. These strategies are key to crisis mitigation and violence prevention efforts, but cannot stand on their own as the sole prevention strategy for a community or a region.

Tertiary prevention refers to focused deradicalization efforts, including through prison deradicalization programs and “exit”-type counseling services that aim to help radicalized individuals leave extremist groups. These specialized efforts require significant training and require evidence-based approaches aimed at preventing recidivism and are essential for probation officers and related roles.

An effective public health approach to countering violent extremism would require at least four simultaneous categories of effort that are a) rooted in communities’ needs; b) holistic and whole-of-society; c) rely on evidence-based interventions; and d) focus on building resilient systems, not just resilient individuals. I address each of these in turn below.

Prevention that is responsive to and rooted in community needs

A public health model for preventing violent extremist must, first and foremost, be rooted in listening and responding to community needs. This is more than being merely “community-based”—it means being truly rooted in and grounded in solutions that are desired and meaningful to local communities. There is no one size fits all model because each community across any given country are struggling with different aspects of violent extremism and radicalization. Some communities will be grappling with white supremacist extremism, while others are plagued with unlawful militia violence or other forms of anti-government extremism. Even within any given community, there are variations in need across specific groups: the needs within K-12 schools trying to educate teenagers about digital literacy and harmful online content in youth subcultural platforms will vary from the needs of religious leaders grappling with growing conspiratorial beliefs in their congregations or of local hospitals facing threats to their gender-affirming care clinics. Public health prevention approaches must adapt to the changing needs of local communities.

A whole-of-society approach to prevention

Second, a deep and effective public health prevention approach to countering domestic terrorism requires to a more holistic, whole-of-government, whole-of-society and proactive response to domestic terrorism. This requires broadening understandings of intervention beyond what has been the largest set of investments—in secondary prevention (intervening with already-radicalized individuals or groups)—to include substantial investments in primary and tertiary prevention as well. Doing this well would involve deepening the engagement of a wide range of government offices, agencies, and organizations beyond the security and law enforcement sectors, such as the education, health and human services, and mental health sectors. It would include primary prevention efforts through the arts, community organizations, faith communities, or other community-based non-profits

Such an approach engages parents and caregivers, teachers and educators, employers and unions, and a wide range of community leaders, including from the faith community, higher education community, athletic coaches, members of local performing arts and artistic communities, and a wide range of mental health counselors and first responders. Each of these communities should receive training on recognizing red flags and warning signs, initial pathways for off-ramping or intervention conversations, and where to get additional help. But they also need to be included and engaged in a robust set of primary prevention strategies that would include broad public civic education about key tenets of liberal democracy (including the rule of law, the protection of minority rights, etc.). And all communities need to have access to  evidence-based ‘prebunking’ and ‘attitudinal inoculation’ strategies that are proven effective tools for teaching people how manipulative and persuasive rhetoric works and how they can protect themselves from it.

Reliance on evidence-based interventions

Third, a true public health approach rests on evidence at all levels of intervention. Evidence has been thin across the field of prevention of violent extremism, especially in terms of the effectiveness of applied interventions. In most cases, evaluations of effectiveness are limited to outcome numbers that describe the numbers of people trained, the numbers of downloads of a particular tool, or other descriptive metrics that do not actually provide evidence of impact. A deeper understanding of impact would include both qualitative and quantitative impact assessments that include the use of pre- and post-testing, control groups, and significance testing. It would also include process evaluation and iterative assessment of how implementation of interventions is going, what practitioners need to improve delivery of interventions, and how the reception of those interventions is going at the community level. Multidisciplinary teams are essential both for the generation of new ideas and to ensure that impact assessment and evaluation of effectiveness is based on multiple epistemological and methodological approaches. This will be challenging for non-academics to do in the absence of significant funding to either build out their own methodological expertise or partner with academic institutions. Funders must both incentivize and provide funding for rigorous impact assessment and evaluation that goes beyond one-time descriptive metrics.

Focus on resilient systems, not resilient individuals

Fourth and finally, a holistic public health approach must acknowledge and address structural and systemic issues that may contribute to the problem that is targeted for intervention. In the case of physical health, for example, this would mean that a public health approach not only educates communities about healthy eating and exercise choices as a way of reducing the incidence of cardiac disease and diabetes, but also acknowledges and resolves community issues related to food deserts or the lack of green spaces, time, or resources to exercise.

In the case of violent extremism, a public health approach to countering disinformation, for example, must acknowledge challenges related to media access and quality education, as well as the lack of effective content moderation strategies that reduce the amount of harmful online content that crosses people’s screens. In the case of countries like the U.S., it must acknowledge the added challenge that issues related to gun access and gun safety add to the likelihood of violent actors’ success and the lethality of their attacks. And a public health approach must also acknowledge deeply-rooted histories of racism, misogyny, and other forms of structural and systemic exclusion that live on today in legacies of unequal school quality, residential neighborhood safety, and more. These issues all affect individuals’ attitudes and beliefs about race, gender, inequality, and their exposure to harmful content that can open up pathways to radicalization. Resilience to propaganda and disinformation is not merely a technical skill, in other words: it is also rooted in national and community values and commitment to an inclusive democracy that must be reinforced, emphasized, and modeled in all aspects of life across the life course. This also means that prevention approaches must understand their own impact on communities at risk and think about their broader impact on social cohesion. The damage done by prevention approaches in the post 9/11 context—in which some of the countering violent extremism approaches—even those with labels like “community cohesion”—were clearly focused on “integrating” immigrants or Muslims in order to “secure” the dominant group against perceived threats from the “other.” That kind of prevention work produced social cohesion deficits that we are still reeling from—reduced trust, sense of belonging, and sense of community—among some of the most marginalized members of our societies. An effective and holistic public health approach must address structural and systemic issues in ways that listen to communities’ needs, respond to their concerns, and focus on reducing the fertile ground in which hate and extremism can thrive. This means that a public health approach is not just aimed at creating resilient individuals—rather, the aim should be creating more resilient systems that leave little room for pathways to violent extremism to open up to begin with. This is a vision of a public health-style prevention system that works to prevent violence and counter harm while simultaneously promoting concrete steps toward inclusive equity, respect, coexistence, and real and symbolic recognition of difference.

Policy recommendations

Adopting an effective, holistic public health model to prevention like the one I have just outlined will require significant capacity building efforts across government agencies and employees. As new agencies, ministries, and organizations are asked to engage with prevention efforts, they will need training and knowledge about far-right extremism and other threats. Updated trainings are needed to more effectively address domestic terrorism on the public safety side, including through school safety officers, university community safety officers, public safety officers, and other private security staff, first responders, or public response personnel. The same trainings are needed for mental health and school counseling personnel, teachers, coaches, and other front-line personnel who might be able to recognize early red flags and warning signs.

All of these types of individuals need training related to the changing landscape of domestic terrorism toward post-organizational forms (i.e., online radicalization outside of groups) and a broader range of ideological motivations for violence (including violent incel/involuntary celibate and male supremacist violence, QAnon and conspiracy related violence, ‘Western supremacist’ violence, and a wide range of new white supremacist extremist and anti-government extremist groups, including unlawful militias and civil war oriented groups. They also need training with a specific focus on the increasingly blurry and muddy ideologies and changing types of warning signs, as well as the changing demographics of violent actors. And finally, there is a significant need for training and capacity-building to bolster expertise in and familiarity with online radicalization, including in the ways these groups and subcultures communicate online, such as through memes and the use of humor, satire, irony, and jokes to dehumanize others, desensitize or gamify violence, or mobilize toward violent action. This includes a need for training in the range of platforms and the types of communication present in online radicalization, including through moderated and unmoderated social media platform chats and servers and in comment boards on mainstream sites.

States, regions, and federal governments should consider establishing regular training programs, including self-guided online training modules, to educate government employees, supervisors, and contractors about manipulative and harmful online rhetoric, conspiracy theories, false claims, and propaganda. Countries and regions should also establish or bolster funding and mechanisms for study and learning of other states and countries’ regional and community-level responses to domestic terrorism, including both lessons learned and promising/best practice models, including possible small-scale focused in-person visits or study tours. Regions, states, and cities or local communities should consider establishing a dedicated staff member or team at the local or regional level to coordinate and direct these efforts, communicate best practices across the region, collect and report on data, and address each of the above points in coordination with national, regional, state, and local partners as well as counterpoints globally.

Conclusion

As we move toward public health style intervention and prevention initiatives to counter violent far-right extremism (and other forms of extremism), we necessarily spent more and more time on interventions that target the mainstream, rather than the fringes. In this light it is essential to note that all efforts to counter domestic terrorism must ensure there is no infringement on the right to freedom of expression. Prevention efforts cannot be directed toward suppression of speech, except in cases of incitement of violence or violation of policies established by employers, technology platforms, or codes of conduct, or in the case of specific legislation that restricts or bans the expression or display of particular symbols or references. Above all, it is critical to recognize that changing forms of mass violence, terrorism and extremism require new and different kinds of solutions. To effectively address rising far-right violent extremism, we need creative and imaginative ideas from unexpected disciplines and unconventional partners, including the world of the arts, culture, sports, and faith communities in addition to education, social work and mental health services, and conventional expertise from the terrorism sector. It will take a whole of society approach to counter the emerging threats analyzed and detailed here.