Rethinking the Far Right Through a Social Movement Lens

Recent developments in Europe, including the financial crisis of 2008 and its economic repercussions and the refugee crisis intensifying eight years later, created favorable conditions for increased mobilization of far-right organizations and movements. There is a large and growing literature showing this. The research literature on the far right has mainly focused on populist right-wing political parties and electoral behavior, and has been paying less attention to the non-partisan milieu of the far right that surrounds and often supports them. Moreover, the boundaries between far-right movements and populist radical right-wing parties are increasingly ‘blurred’, in the current fourth wave of radical right-wing mobilization and it is hence of key importance to focus on far-right movements and on protests of the far right, including both political parties and not-party organizations. Building on decades of scholarly research on the far right, this chapter brings attention to the movement sector of the far right and, simultaneously, to a social movement approach to the far right and its methodological implications. It also makes an important contribution to the field of social movements, which, as will be further discussed below, until recently focused primarily on left wing and green movements, and showed comparatively less interest in right-wing movements. Over the past decade(s), this has begun to shift, creating an opportunity to synthesize existing research and highlight promising directions for future inquiry.