Grand Stories: Right-wing Extremism and Liberal Democracy

Why is right-wing extremism a problem in a liberal democracy? To most, the answer will be self-evident: an ideology of fundamental inequality between human beings contravenes the key principles of human dignity, equality, and pluralism that liberal democracies build on. In Germany, these principles are enshrined in the constitution, the Basic Law, or Grundgesetz (GG), from 1949, which defines human dignity as inviolable (Art. 1 GG) and outlaws discrimination based on “raceˮ, origin, faith, gender, and so on (Art. 3 GG, “Equality before the Lawˮ). Since Germany is a democratic state, all state authority derives from the German people, whereby “Germanˮ refers to anyone who holds German citizenship (Art. 20(2) and Art. 116 GG).

In light of an increasingly transnational and agile far-right that has learned to couch its racist ideas into a language of freedom and (ethno-)pluralism, the detection of right-wing extremist networks within state institutions, and the many violent attacks against political representatives and (other) civilians that have occurred across the country in recent years, German governments have become increasingly conscious of the fact that rejection of liberal-democratic principles is not limited to a bunch of self-declared enemies of the constitution on the fringes of society. However, they have not generally gone as far as to question the existence of a clear dividing line between right-wing extremism and liberal democracy. At a time when liberal democracy is increasingly under threat, doing so seems counter-intuitive to say the least. Surely, it is imperative that we re-affirm our commitment to the norms and values of liberal democracy and stand up to those whose declared aim it is to abolish the liberal-democratic order. This is undoubtedly the task before us. The question is: how we do this, given that in reality, substantial flaws accompany liberal-democratic practice(s)?

Specifically, the problem is that the way in which we talk about liberal democracy often undermines its status as the counter-model to right-wing extremism and thereby weakens it. To understand how and why this happens, and what to do about it, it is helpful to think of the relationship between (violent) right-wing extremism and liberal democracy in terms of opposing yet connected stories.

The grand story behind right-wing extremism

The contemporary extreme-right, in Germany and elsewhere, spans a range of ideologies, from identitarianism to neo-Nazism and anti-Islam factions such as the “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of Occident” or PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes). In spite of the differences between them (relating for instance to intellectual traditions and specific enemy images), they increasingly converge around a powerful, transnational story of loss, betrayal, revenge, and rebirth. They see (Christian) white people as superior to other “races” or cultures and therefore consider political, social, economic, and legal inequalities between whites and these allegedly inferior groups as natural, justified, and desirable. In an increasingly interconnected world, they consider this natural, white supremacist order under threat from not only these “inferior others” themselves, but also from the political and cultural elites – often defined as an all-controlling global Jewry – who enable and promote their migration to, and existence and prosperity within, white-majority countries. This combined belief in supremacy and victimisation motivates a call for retributive action against both “inferior others” and “internal traitors” in the name of defending or restoring a white supremacist order. In recent years, this story has increasingly played out in violent attacks in everyday spaces, such as workplaces and private homes, in houses of worship, in shops, clubs, and bars – not just in Germany.

Thinking of contemporary right-wing extremist violence in terms of this grand story –composed of loss and betrayal in the past, a call for revenge in the present, and the promise of a better future for the ethnic majority – raises an important question, especially given that their narrative resonates increasingly with parts of the population: what (counter-) story do liberal democracies like Germany tell about themselves? And how effective is this story?

The grand story of liberal democracy

Reducing individuals’ identities to their (real or assumed) membership in ethnic, cultural, or (and) religious groups, assigning immutable characteristics to and asserting the existence of a natural hierarchy between them is, as the Racism in Germany report puts it, “fundamentally at odds with the free democratic basic order and an open, pluralistic society guided by a model of equal opportunities.” This idea of Germany’s liberal-democratic order as inherently anti-racist finds its expression not only in the Basic Law. It also corresponds to the powerful story that Germany tells about itself.

This story is a story of success. Its main contours are defined by Western and European integration on the one hand and the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “working off the pastˮ,on the other hand. It goes something like this: following a long period of repression and a focus on German suffering after the end of the Second World War, (West) Germany eventually managed – owing to persistent efforts from below as well as favourable social, economic, and political conditions – to accept its dictatorial, nationalist, anti-Semitic, and genocidal past as central to its collective identity. Through this process, it came to acknowledge its historical guilt, embrace the duty to remember, and accept its responsibility to prevent such evil from ever happening again, in Germany and elsewhere in the world.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 that had separated the Federal Republic in the West from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East and reunification of the two Germanies less than a year later, Germany held on to its success story – in spite of the high levels of racist violence in the wake of this historical moment. The process reached its peak in the late 1990s when the first left-of-centre coalition came to power on the federal level after sixteen years of CDU/CSU-led governments under “chancellor of unity” (Einheitskanzler) Helmut Kohl, and the German capital was moved (back) from Bonn to Berlin, giving Germany the sense of a new beginning. As the historian Edgar Wolfrum concluded in 2006, the history of the Federal Republic is the history of a “successful democracyˮ (geglückte Demokratie). In 1945, and even decades later, this had not been a foregone conclusion.

Since the turn of the millennium, Germany’s status as a “country of immigrationˮ has gradually become incorporated into this success story. The history of post-war immigration to the two Germanies is long and complex, shaped by their own political interests and economic needs as much as world events. The different groups of immigrants include ethnic German expellees in the immediate post-war years and late resettlers after the collapse of the Soviet Union, guest and contract workers, for example from Turkey, Greece, and Vietnam , as well as refugees and asylum seekers from within and outside the European continent.

In the early 2000s, the term “integrationˮ gradually found its way into German immigration debates to account for this reality, flanked by landmark changes to immigration and citizenship law. The first integration summit was held under the leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel in July 2006 and a first National Action Plan for Integration was published a year later with the declared aim, as Merkel put it in her foreword, to make Germany a “common homeˮ and a “loveable and livable Heimatˮ for all. Paradoxically, it is precisely this effort to actively shape the process of growing together as a diverse society that has led to greater contestation of what it means to be German. This is because now more people from a wider range of personal and cultural backgrounds get to be part of the debate (the German sociologist Aladin El-Mafaalani calls this the “integration paradoxˮ). As Merkel’s foreword to the Action Plan makes clear, “integrationˮ also, rather unhelpfully, started out as a deficit-oriented concept, focused on the lack of German language skills, low levels of education, and high levels of unemployment among “people with a migration backgroundˮ vis-a-vis “Germansˮ. Over time, this has led to a particular way of thinking about Germany as a country of immigration, as Afro Germans, Turkish Germans, Arab and Muslim Germans, in particular, have come to play a double role in the German success story:

On the one hand, their physical presence in Germany is often seen as proof that it is indeed the kind of open and pluralist country that right-wing extremists reject. This became particularly clear on 31 August 2015 when Chancellor Merkel opened her summer press conference by presenting the influx of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (many of whom were expected to settle long-term) as a vindication of Germany’s success story: “The world sees Germany as a land of hope and opportunity, and it really wasn’t always like that.ˮ On the other hand, there is still a sense that “immigrantsˮ, because they presumably arrived in the country later than “the Germansˮ, continue to be somehow “different fromˮ them. That is, they are not (fully) recognised as being of Germany, even if they were themselves born in the country, are German native speakers or hold German citizenship. The two sides – being key to Germany’s national identity and yet not belonging fully – are tied together through the liberal-democratic promise that “immigrantsˮ can become “like the Germansˮ through a process of integration. In this way, an idea is preserved that “fullˮ or “properˮ Germans exist as a neutral reference group around which society is organised and its problems of living together can be defined.

The Federal Expert Commission on Integration has recently acknowledged the problematic legacy of this dominant integration discourse and demanded a more comprehensive approach to integration as an “ongoing” and “unending” task for all of German society that is not limited to managing immigration. This is indeed crucial because the formula “in, but not yet of Germany” comes dangerously close to identifying “immigrants” as a “problem people”, which Du Bois warned against more than a century ago. The consequences of this are particularly apparent in the context of right-wing extremist violence.

Responding to right-wing extremist violence

After major right-wing extremist attacks, democratic leaders often invoke Germany’s post-war success story because they consider it a natural antidote to the extremist worldview expressed through such violence. As then-Chancellor Merkel said in her speech honouring the victims of the Neo-Nazi terrorist cell National Socialist Underground (NSU) on 23 February 2012:

“Human dignity is inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” – These are the first words of our constitution [Grundgesetz]. It was the answer to twelve years of National Socialism in Germany, to unspeakable contempt for human beings and barbarism, to the breach of civilisation [Zivilisationsbruch] that was the Shoa. “Human dignity is inviolable.” That is the foundation for our living together in our country, of the free democratic basic order of the Federal Republic of Germany. Whenever people in our country are excluded, threatened, persecuted, it violates the foundation of this free and democratic basic order, and the values of our constitution. This is why the murders by the Thuringian terror cell were also an attack on our country. They are a disgrace to our country.

Between 1998 and 2011, the NSU, supported by an extensive right-wing extremist network, committed 10 murders, most of them targeting people with personal or family histories of migration to Germany from Turkey and Greece, and attempted to murder dozens more in three bombings in cities across Germany, accompanied by a series of armed robberies. Its terrorist campaign was recognised as such only when their cover was blown in early November 2011.

            In some ways, Merkel’s speech laid the groundwork for what would subsequently emerge as official government policy: intolerance and racism, she said, were not limited to right-wing extremists, but manifested themselves in everyday practices and expressions of contempt for and exclusion of others. This had clearly been shown by the racist media coverage of and criminal investigations into the targeted killings (labelled “Kebab murders” in 2005) and bombings before the discovery of the NSU’s existence. Over a period of several years, journalists and investigators had homogenised and devalued the victims as “Turkish immigrants” who had “not yet properly arrived” in Germany, regardless of their factual Germanness as indicated by Germany being their country of birth or place of long-term residence,, German citizenship, or (native) German language skills. Their “lifeworld” allegedly deviated from that of “the Germans” and remained difficult to penetrate: they were in, but not (yet) of Germany. In consequence, the victims, their families and communities were widely treated as part of the problem and as an obstacle to solving the crimes.

In light of these facts, “good democrats”, Merkel insisted, had to prove their commitment to human dignity, freedom, and pluralism by actively defending these values – including the “diversity” brought to Germany through immigration – on an everyday basis. “Germany”, she said, included anyone who lived in the country, regardless of origin, appearance, beliefs, age, or disability.

How did this radically inclusive vision of Germany, an important lesson from the many scandals surrounding the NSU, compare to reality after November 2011? As Merkel’s speech illustrates, once the perpetrators had been identified as Neo-Nazis, the victims and their families became central to positioning a successful, diverse, and liberal democracy against the right-wing extremists and their misanthropic ideology. The importance of them being in Germany was recognised. However, this still did not result in the victims being recognized as full members of German society.

The best illustration of this is the five-year NSU trial (2013-2018) at the Regional High Court in Munich. The task of the prosecution (which in Germany is part of the executive branch of government) was to translate the late realisation that the NSU’s terrorist attacks were, as Merkel had put it, “also an attack on our country” into a legally viable story. The story that the prosecution presented, both in the indictment in 2012 and in the final plea in 2017, made clear that the perpetrators had violated the core principles of the relationship between the liberal-democratic state and its citizens. While the German population “with a migration background” had been the immediate target of terrorist violence, the state had been its ultimate target because the perpetrators had aimed to replace it with a national-socialist order and thereby return the country to the darkest period in its history. In the end, however, the state had prevailed.

On the face of it, this seems like a powerful way of extolling Germany’s liberal-democratic achievements against enemies of the constitution. But the story had one major flaw: it subsumed the experiences of violence and terrorisation of the individuals and communities targeted by the NSU under the “liberal-democratic order” that had to be defended against the terrorists. As a result, the trial gave little space to victims’ critique of state institutions and their demeaning and racist practices as this would have weakened the success story that the prosecution wanted to tell. Paradoxically though, that was exactly what the victims were trying to do: share their years of suffering with the wider German public so something like the NSU would never happen again and the German success story would be allowed to continue.

Tragically, only a few years later, something like the NSU murders did happen again when, in the late evening on 19 February 2020, a local resident shot dead nine people in bars and kiosks in Hanau, a medium-sized city just outside Frankfurt/Main (Hesse). In her press statement the next morning, Chancellor Merkel said that following the NSU’s violent campaign, the murder of district president Walter Lübcke at his private home near Kassel (Hesse) by a right-wing extremist on the night of 1 June 2019, and the anti-Semitic and racist attack in Halle on 9 October 2019 that had left two people dead, the attacks in Hanau were yet another crime caused by the “poison of racismˮ in German society. Echoing her own words from the official state ceremony for the NSU victims eight years earlier, she reiterated that “the federal government and government institutions stand for the rights and dignity of every person in our country. We do not distinguish between citizens based on origin or religion. With all our strength and determination, we oppose those who try to divide Germany.”

Local politicians, members of parliament, and other officials were also quick to emphasise that “the victims were no aliens [Fremde]”, but locals from Hanau and the wider region whose murder had been motivated by racist hatred. The attack, the then-president of the Bundesrat, the upper house of the German parliament, Dietmar Woidke said, was “directed against [all of] us. […] All this has happened before in this country! It must not happen again.”

In some important ways, then, Germany seems to have learned from previous mistakes. At the same time, and in striking parallels to institutional responses to the NSU, the families of the victims in Hanau have struggled to access information about the police investigations and receive adequate compensation from the state. They also continue to struggle for the right to publicly commemorate the victims in a way that marks their lives and deaths as much of an intrinsic part of German history as for example the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, to whom Hanau dedicates a national monument on its market square.

Conclusion

Thinking of racism, right-wing extremism and violence not only as threats from the fringes but also as problems that exist within liberal democracy itself challenges Germany’s positive self-image in a fundamental sense. To be sure, these problems manifest themselves differently in Germany than they do in other Western countries, including in the US, which continues to see itself as an “exceptional nation” and has only just begun to critically examine its own violent past in a serious manner, with predictable (and consequential) backlash effects. For Germany, ironically, despite its success story, sincere defences of liberal democracy can go hand in hand with maintaining racist attitudes and practices, including through (but not limited to) the seemingly benign formula “in, but not yet of Germany”.

            In light of a reinvigorated extreme right, anyone expressively committed to liberal democracy, can no longer afford to tell a story of Germany that has an essential distinction between “the Germansˮ and “immigrantsˮ at its core. Instead, to safeguard its historical achievements and move forward amidst a tense political climate, Germany needs to develop new ways of thinking about itself. This means devoting greater attention to violent histories and racist phenomena that have been marginalised in the past. It also requires an honest confrontation with the national self-understanding behind its success story as a liberal-democratic country of immigration. This is not to say that crime and (other) social problems in an increasingly complex society should be left unaddressed, on the contrary. It simply means to address these problems without singling out and homogenising some of society’s members as “problem people” – regardless of intention – and instead accept that German society, like any other, is made up of “people with problems”.

Established definition of the far right: ideological markers

There may not be one unanimously agreed definition of right-wing extremism, but most conceptualisations have shown ‘actually a high degree of consensus’. Cas Mudde’s seminal analysis of 26 definitions found that five ideological markers were particularly common: ‘nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy and the strong state.’ In 2018, Elisabeth Carter identified six key features of right-wing extremism, which dovetail with Mudde’s list: ‘strong state or authoritarianism, nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy, and populism or anti-establishment rhetoric.’ Not all these ideological markers need to be present to classify a group as far-right, although most far-right groups advocate some form of exclusionary nationalism and anti-egalitarianism, ‘valorizing of inequality and hierarchy’.

Several scholars propose a differentiation between right-wing extremism and radicalism. While the former fundamentally rejects democracy and core democratic principles, the latter ‘does not include an explicitly anti-democratic agenda’, but opposes key tenets of liberal democracy, most obviously the principle of equal human dignity and egalitarianism. The term far right is used as an umbrella to capture both right-wing extremism and radicalism.

Fragmented and increasingly extreme: an overview on the contemporary far right in Australia 

Far-right extremism and radicalism have a long history in Australia, reaching back to the interwar period, but they have been less visible compared to North America and many European countries. Fleming and Mondon argue that, while Australia may have appeared less susceptible to the appeal of far-right movements, ‘rather than immunity, the absence of extreme right politics can be explained by the ability and willingness of mainstream politics to readily, openly, and socially absorb such values’ – an assessment closely aligned with the key argument in this paper.

In the mid-2010s, the heightened moral panic in Australian society around Islam and Muslim communities ‘created fertile ground for the emergence of new far-right groups.’ Aggressive anti-Islam narratives, which resonated with a significant proportion of the population, were central to the initial mobilisation success of these groups. Mainstream social media platform Facebook was their main rallying platform, but some also had a physical presence and engaged in relatively large street protests across Australia. Based on an online analysis in 2017-18, one of the first empirical studies of the contemporary far-right in Australia, found that these anti-Islam groups constitute one of three main types of far-right milieu, next to cultural and racial superiority groups.

1. Anti-Islam groups such as Reclaim Australia or Stop the Mosque were particularly prolific, online and offline, and attracted large numbers of followers and supporters. Some of them counted well over 100,000 individual users on their Facebook pages (i.e. users who interacted with their page), frequently sharing highly Islamophobic content and claiming that Islam and/or Muslims pose a physical and cultural threat to Australia and the western world.  
2. Cultural superiority groups such as Soldiers of Odin or True Blue Crew pushed a more nationalistic-focused agenda based on cultural supremacy claims and what Fozdar and Low described as ‘ethnonationalism masquerading as civic nationalism’. Most of these groups were organised locally, bringing together ideologically dedicated members who publicly demonstrated their group membership through specific logos and clothing and were actively involved in various public rallies. Their Facebook pages attracted usually smaller numbers of individual users compared to the anti-Islam groups, although one of them, led by a prominent far-right figure with previous neo-Nazi connections, counted over 163,000 users on his Facebook page.
3. Racial superiority groups pursued an agenda characterised by blatant antisemitism, white supremacy and rejection of democracy. They were small groups organised in physical spaces and had significantly fewer online followers. This type encompasses far-right extremist groups such as Combat 18, Southern Cross Hammerskins or Nationalist Alternative Australia, which have been in existence prior to the mid-2010s, as well as new groups such as Antipodean Resistance (now defunct but morphed into a different group).

While this three-fold typology is conceptually still useful, far-right milieus have changed significantly since this study was conducted. Not long after the re-emergence of the ‘new’ far right under a predominately anti-Islam banner in the mid-2010s, the public hysteria around ISIS and jihadist terrorism had reached its peak and started to diminish. Anti-Islam street protests became less frequent and ultimately ceased; online anti-Islam groups became less prolific. Islamophobic content has remained widespread on social media, but these narratives have lost some of their initial traction as a core mobilisation theme within the far right.

Simultaneously, the messaging in far-right spaces shifted towards a more racialized agenda with expressions of aggressive ultra-nationalism, white supremacy and claims of an alleged ‘white genocide’. The abovementioned 2018 study found evidence for an ‘increasingly radical or extreme rhetoric, including statements that openly reject parliamentary democracy as a legitimate form of government, expressions of authoritarian attitudes, and the endorsement of violence.’ This ideological radicalisation process gained further momentum in the aftermaths of the March 2019 Christchurch terror attacks. Notwithstanding ongoing internal ideological differences and fragmentation, a racialised white supremacy agenda was no longer limited to neo-Nazi extremist groups but has swept across Australia’s far-right milieus. Both a symptom of, and a catalyst for, this radicalisation trend is the rising popularity of alt-tech social media platforms among the far right, especially in response to account takedowns on Facebook and Twitter after the Christchurch terror attacks. Many leading far-right figures, who had built up large online communities on Facebook through their anti-Islam agitation, moved their social media activities to other platforms with very limited content moderation such as Gab and Telegram – and tens of thousands of Australians followed them into these ideologically more radicalised online environments. The sub-group ‘Australia’ on Gab, for example, a platform described as a ‘right-leaning echo-chamber’ where antisemitism and ‘white identity’ narratives are omnipresent, has gained enormous popularity with membership numbers skyrocketing from 4,700 in mid-March 2019 to currently almost 74,000. This is not to say that Twitter and Facebook have been abandoned by the far right, but they do not play the same central role in far-right mobilisation as in the mid-2010s.

With this proliferation of far-right ecosystems on alt-tech social media, organisational structures have diminished. While between 2015 and 2018, far-right groups such as Reclaim Australia, United Patriots Front, Soldiers of Odin or the True Blue Crew dominated the far-right scene and their online and offline mobilisation, all these groups have become defunct by the end of the decade. Australian far-right milieus today are characterised by markedly low organisational levels with limited leadership capacities. It comprises mostly of ideologically likeminded individuals loosely connected on social media, forming online communities, and a number of small groups across the country who meet offline. The only significant exception currently is one particular hierarchical structured neo-Nazi organisation that has established itself as the leading and most prominent organisational actor within Australia’s far-right (extremist) milieu.

A public climate rife with Islamophobia facilitated the re-emergence and initial proliferation of the far right, but its subsequent ideological radicalisation with rising prevalence of extremist, white supremacist agendas led to a contraction of far-right spaces, instead of a quantitative expansion, in the late 2010s. This, however, changed in the 2020s when new crises provided unprecedented opportunities for the far right to attract new sympathisers. The COVID-19 pandemic and respective public health responses created political discontent and grievances among many Australians. A significant proportion of them ­expressed anti-government and anti-establishment conspiratorial views similar to those that had emerged as dominant narratives in far-right milieus. According to an Essential Poll in May 2020, one in five Australians believed the ‘number of Covid-19 deaths have been exaggerated by the media and governments to scare the population’; 13% believed that ‘Bill Gates played a role in the creation and spread of Covid-19’ and that ‘the virus is ’not dangerous and is being used to force people to get vaccines’. Far-right milieus extensively fuelled these conspiratorial sentiments through prolific posting of misinformation and racist, anti-government messaging, whilst offering a new home for those who opposed lockdowns and vaccinations and felt silenced and abandoned by the government. As studies have shown, Covid-19 was the key mobilisation theme in far-right online environments in the early 2020s, both on mainstream platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as well as alt-tech sites such as Gab – with significant effects: Tens of thousands of people have joined these far-right online ecosystems (see Figure 1), where they have been encountered broader far-right ideological messaging and become part of a parallel ‘anti-public’ community defined by its hostility towards minorities and fundamental opposition to government, established institutions and democratic conventions. 

Far-right ideologies and mainstream attitudes and discourses

These brief elaborations illustrate that we cannot understand the Australian far right without paying attention to the social context within which it has (re)emerged and evolved. Exclusivist, anti-egalitarian and anti-establishment sentiments – key ideological markers of the far right – are not limited to the societal fringes but substantially shape the public discourse and, in doing so, influence the rise and appeal of the far right.

Racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia are not limited to far-right milieus but have been, and continue to be, widespread in Australian society. A large survey in the mid-2010s found that almost one third of respondents expressed negative attitudes towards Australian Muslims, and one in five had negative feelings towards refugees. According to the annual Scanlon Mapping Social Cohesion survey, anti-Muslim attitudes have been even more prevalent (41 % in 2017; 32% in 2021). Lead researcher of these annual surveys, Andrew Markus, concluded that ‘the level of negative sentiment towards those of the Muslim faith, and by extension to immigrants from Muslim countries, is a factor of significance in contemporary Australian society.’ More specifically, and particularly relevant to the Bendigo mosque conflict, Riaz Hassan found in his representative survey that almost one in four respondents (23.9%) expressed support for any policy that would stop building new mosques.

The vast majority of Australians are proud of their country. It is, of course, entirely unproblematic that over 85% of Australians express a ‘sense of pride in the Australian way of life and culture’. However, when national pride is combined with anti-immigration, anti-egalitarian and cultural superiority attitudes, we are entering the far-right ideological territory of exclusionary nationalism. According to the Australian Election Study, around one in three Australians has negative views on immigration and immigrants: In the 2019 survey, 36% stated immigration increases the crime rate, 31% said immigrants take jobs away from Australians, and 32% were of the view that ‘equal opportunities for immigrants have gone too far’. Such findings have led some academics to the conclusion that ‘Nativism is mainstream in Australia’.    

A majority of Australians want ethnic, cultural or religious minorities to ‘behave more like mainstream Australians’ and think that ‘too many immigrants are not adopting Australian values’. Such assimilation claims reflect a widespread sense of cultural superiority and protective pride in ‘our culture’; but they are also an ideological trademark of the far right. A group of anti-Islam protesters with ties to prominent far-right leaders expressed similar views during an interview, stressing that immigrants need to assimilate into the ‘Australian culture’. They accepted that Australian society is ‘multi-ethnic’ but rejected ‘multiculturalism’, which they alleged is part of a nefarious secretive plot to ‘break’ Australian society by creating ‘a series of tribes.’

Cultural superiority attitudes are frequently articulated not only in the far right, but also – and in rhetorically very similar ways – in broader public discourses. Resonating with Huntington’s ‘clash of civilization’ hypothesis, as the argument often goes, Western culture and civilization are under threat from outside, for example by non-European immigration, and from inside by the progressive (‘woke’) agenda of the political left or elites. Such claims are common in far-right online ecosystems, but they also appear in mainstream media, right-wing intellectual magazines such as The Spectator or The Quadrant, in books (including some by established academics) available on platforms like Amazon, and even on Google Scholar or academic databases. There is limited representative data in Australia on the salience of such cultural threat attitudes. However, the soon-to-be-published findings from an explorative survey among 335 Australian men, conducted in 2021 by the author and colleagues as part of a larger Australian Research Council (ARC) project, show that over half of all respondents agreed with the statement that ‘Western civilisation is under attack’, with less than 29% disagreeing.

In parts of the far right such threat narratives are framed in an explicitly racialised way, claiming that not only is ‘our’ way of life, culture or civilisation under threat but so is ‘white identity’. Such ideological beliefs are closely aligned with prominent white supremacy conspiracy theories of ‘White genocide’ or ‘Great Replacement’, which have played an important role in driving far-right extremists to commit violent terrorist attacks, including Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch in 2019. The Great Replacement is the title of Tarrant’s manifesto, inspired by a 2011 book with the same title by the French far-right intellectual Renaud Camus, who claims that the French (and European) population is being demographically and culturally replaced as a result of non-European immigration. It is worth noting that Camus’s book You Will Not Replace Us!, described as an ‘attempt at summing up in a short book, for the English-speaking (sic) and international public, such works as Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement)’, is available for purchase on Amazon.

Such ethno-racialized notions of white victimhood also manifest in allegations of anti-white racism. This has become a very common narrative within far-right spaces, but it is not limited to extremist political fringes. In October 2018, the right-wing populist One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson put forward her infamous ‘it’s okay to be white’ motion in the Australian Senate making claims of a ‘deplorable rise of anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation’. The motion was only narrowly defeated by 31 to 29 votes in the Senate. More recently, an opinion piece in a popular mainstream tabloid referred to ‘toxic new anti-white racism’ in its headline, and several studies have found evidence that a not insignificant proportion of Australians believe that anti-white racism is a problem. Findings from the aforementioned 2021 ARC survey among Australian men show that one in three respondents agreed with the statement that ‘White people are the victims these days’, although “only” a bit more than 5% agreed with the blatantly white supremacy statement that ‘white people are superior to others’ (although a further 9% did not disagree with that statement).

Explicit white supremacist attitudes may be held – or openly expressed – by only a small minority. However, a look at Australia’s history leaves little doubt that white supremacy was at the core of its colonial project, nation-building and the early formation of its national identity. The invasion and settlement by the British were based on the doctrine of ‘terra nullius’, nobody’s land, to be settled by white British men where Indigenous peoples were seen as ‘of such a lower order of culture and civilisation that there was no need to recognise their laws, their land and other possessions’ In 1901, the first piece of legislation passed by the newly founded Federation was the Immigration Restriction Act, which institutionalised racism through its White Australia Policy for over half a century. At the time, the Attorney-General Alfred Deakin described the aim of this policy as ‘securing a white Australia’, and the first Prime Minister Edmund Barton captured widely held views when he declared during the parliamentary debate of the bill: ‘I do not think … that the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is that basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races—I think no one wants convincing of this fact—unequal and inferior.’

These policies were gradually abolished in the 1950s and ‘60s and subsequently replaced by anti-discrimination legislation and multicultural policies since the 1970s. But the institutionalisation of racism and white supremacy, which reflected and shaped the collective national psyche for decades, offers the contemporary far right in Australia a rhetorical bridge to what Paul Taggart called ‘heartland’, an ideological place ‘constructed retrospectively from the past’, which ‘unlike utopias, … has already been lived and so shown to be feasible’. It is frequently being used in far-right milieus as a nostalgic, but historically accurate reference point through which a white supremacy ideological agenda is sought to be justified, legitimated and normalized. A recent study of far-right online messaging around the ANZAC legend, for example, illustrated how the ANZACs’ military actions in World War I can be co-opted and re-interpreted as a struggle for a white Australia – in the words of a far-right user on Facebook: ‘Lest we forget those proud Australian diggers that gave their lives for their country and for a White Australia …The ANZACs would be rolling in their graves if they knew the multicultural/multiracial abomination their beloved nation has become’. Anti-democratic, authoritarianand anti-establishment views are regarded as core ideological markers of the far right, but they, too, are relatively widespread in Australian society. According to the annual Lowy Institute poll, three of four Australians regard democracy as ‘preferable to any other kind of government’. But that leaves one quarter who disagree, and 18% stated that ‘in some circumstances, a non-democratic government can be preferable’. According to the Australian Values Survey in 2018, more than one in ten thought that ‘having a democratic political system’ was fairly bad (8%) or very bad (3%), and even one third expressed authoritarian attitudes stating that ‘having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections’ would be fairly good (24%) or very good (9%). Anti-establishment attitudes, especially towards governments, political leaders and the media, are even shared by a majority of Australians. The latest Edelmann trust Barometer survey found that a majority thought that journalists (65%), business leaders (61%) and government leaders (61%) ‘are purposively trying to mislead the people’. According to the 2021 Scanlon study, almost four in ten believed the system of government in Australia needs ‘major changes’ or should be ‘replaced’ all together, and only a minority stated the ‘government in Canberra can be trusted to do the right thing for the Australian people.’

Conspiratorial meta-narrative, action and ‘anti-public’ identity: Demarcation of the far right

How suitable are established sets of ideological characteristics for defining the far right if ‘authoritarianism, nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy, and … anti-establishment rhetoric’ are so widespread across society? Arguing that they are important but in themselves insufficient elements to demarcate the far right, I propose an alternative approach that rests on three interrelated factors: (1) construction of a conspiratorial meta-narrative, (2) ideologically driven political actions, and (3) individuals’ identification with an ’anti-public’ community. In elaborating on these factors, I will also apply them to answer the question posed in the introduction as to why the 2005 Cronulla race riots were not a manifestation of far-right extremism or radicalism – despite their alignment with far-right ideologies.

Ideologies: A conspiracy-based meta-narrative

What characterises the far right is not so much what people think, but how they think. Someone may hold racist or anti-establishments views but what makes these attitudes an indicator for far-right allegiance is how these attitudes shape and cement an overarching meta-narrative. This grand narrative is typically centered on the conspiratorial conviction – or allegation – that secretive forces deliberately seek to destroy ‘us’, Western civilisation or the ‘white race’. These alleged forces are often described as a powerful global cabal – often in openly antisemitic terms, as a Jewish conspiracy – which controls supra-national institutions like the UN or WHO, governments, mainstream media, social media platforms like Facebook and other influential actors. Racism, anti-establishment, anti-democratic and other far-right attitudes become functionally embedded into this large conspiracy narrative.

According to this ‘logic’, for example, non-white immigrants may be dehumanized and targeted as an inferior outgroup, but the real enemy for the far right are those who facilitate immigration and promote multiculturalism with the alleged intention to destroy “our” society, as a prominent far-right figurehead stated in his speech at a rally in Melbourne in early 2019. Similarly, far-right messaging on Gab frequently expressed hostility toward Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists and anti-fascist movements, but these groups are often only secondary targets – ‘useful idiots’ controlled by alleged global Jewish elites. ‘Antifa and BLM are just Jewish created golems’ as one Gab user posted. Another Gab user described black BLM activists and Antifa as ‘useful idiots, who can be dealt with once we have won back our liberty and self-determination. The true enemy is the globalist Jewish ruling class, the corporate media they own, and the politicians they buy’.

This conspiracy narrative constitutes an unquestionable truth in far-right milieus, obvious to all those (‘red-pilled’) who claim they have managed to look behind the smokescreen set up by the allegedly nefarious elites to mislead and control ‘the people’. Such a meta-narrative not only binds various ideological attitudes together in what seem to be an internally coherent belief system. It also creates a sense of urgency, epistemic superiority and moral righteousness, strengthens the collective identity of the in-group, and legitimises (potentially also violent) actions against those who are considered to represent this alleged hostile Goliathan system.   

Such conspiratorial meta-narratives were expressed in sections of the far-right anti-mosque movement in Bendigo in 2015 and they have been articulated at many other far-right demonstrations and in online spaces, but they were absent during the 2005 riots in Cronulla, which were driven by blatant racism and nativism.

Behaviour: Ideologically driven activism

Jérôme Jamin highlights that right-wing extremism refers to ‘a “total” way of acting to give shape to the nationalist project in support of the acknowledgement of inequality.’ Holding certain ideological views may not justify the far-right label unless the person also takes certain actions to promote or advocate their ideological-political cause. I interviewed people who shared exclusionary, conspiratorial views. But while some of them had no desire to make their views public and did not consider themselves ‘activists’, others proudly claimed the badge of political activism and considered it their mission to ‘educate’ others. Ideologically oriented actions may manifest in various ways from attempts to spread these ideological messages and ‘red-pill’ others to attending a far-right rally, joining a far-right group or even committing an act of violence.

The young rioters in Cronulla certainly acted aggressively, and many of them have engaged in what may amount to racist hate speech and hate crimes. What constitutes a political mission and the boundaries between hate-driven behaviour and politically motivated actions is notoriously hard to determine , but the racist actions in Cronulla did not appear to pursue a broader political agenda. Instead they were driven by racism and the goal to assert an Anglo-white dominance in a social space.

Collective identity: belonging to a parallel ‘anti-public’ community

The third factor that helps demark the far right is related to an individual’s personal identification with an ideologically shaped parallel community that rejects the basic rules of public and democratic engagement or what Chantal Mouffe called the ‘ethico-political principles of liberal democracy’. Mark Davis uses the term ‘anti-publics’ to refer to such spaces, characterised by a disregard for ‘principles of argumentation, evidence, truthfulness, mutuality, reciprocity, good faith and inclusiveness’ and ‘a level of hostility to democratic conventions … that in general exceeds … even the most permissive notion of an “agonistic” public sphere.’ Developing a collective identity, a sense of belonging and connection to such an anti-public community, shaped by far-right ideologies, may well be the strongest indicator that a person has become part of the far-right milieu. Within such anti-public communities (online and/or offline), affirmative interaction with ideologically likeminded others, using insider memes, coded language and symbols, can further strengthen in-group identification and consolidate and amplify far-right ideological beliefs systems shared with a community they trust and feel respected and heard.        

The aggressors in Cronulla did not seem to identify with an anti-public counter-hegemonic fringe community. To the contrary, they acted, in their views, as ordinary white ‘Aussies’ seeking to ‘reclaim the beach’. Thus, the 2005 Cronulla riots do not constitute a far-right escalation; instead they were a violent manifestation of widespread racism, perpetrated by young people from the midst of Australian society, fuelled by tabloid media and facilitated by the broader public discourse of anti-Arab moral panic. In this paper, I argue for an alternative approach to defining the far right based on a more holistic assessment that moves beyond a checklist of ideological markers. Established sets of ideological characteristics are important elements but insufficient to demarcate the far right due the prevalence of these ideological attitudes across significant segments of mainstream society. How can we develop effective intervention strategies to address far-right extremism if we struggle to differentiate it from social ills such as racism, nativism or homophobia or issues such as growing government mistrust or anti-establishment sentiments? At the same time, however, tackling the appeal of the far-right is also destined to remain ineffective if we ignore how profoundly connected these political fringe milieus are with mainstream Australia and how salient far-right narratives appear in the public realm.

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.

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. 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.  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.

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.

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.

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.