Research Desk: Radical Right Research

How the so-called Global War on Terrorism has directly contributed far-right extremism, and how repurposing failed war on terror tactics is not the answer to white supremacist and far-right violence.

Highlights from recently published research and studies of the Radical Right including how the so-called Global War on Terrorism has directly contributed far-right extremism, how repurposing failed “war on terror” tactics is not the answer to white supremacist and far-right violence, and a study finds a correlation between lynchings and confederate monuments.

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Organizational Research

• Dehumanisation of ‘Outgroups’ on Facebook and Twitter: Towards a framework for assessing online hate organisations and actors (by Professor Mohamad Abdalla, Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right)

  • “This study tests whether explicit dehumanising language directed at Muslims is detected by tools of Facebook and Twitter; and further, whether the presence of explicit dehumanising terms is necessary to successfully dehumanise ‘the other’ – in this case, Muslims. Answering both these questions in the negative, this analysis extracts universally useful analytical tools that could be used together to consistently and competently assess actors using dehumanisation as a measure, even where that dehumanisation is cumulative and grounded in discourse, rather than explicit language. The output of one prolific actor identified by researchers as an anti-Muslim hate organisation, and four (4) other anti-Muslim actors, are discursively analysed, and impacts considered through the comments they elicit. While this study focuses on material gathered with respect to anti-Muslim discourses, the findings are relevant to a range of contexts where groups are dehumanised on the basis of race or other protected attribute. This study suggests it is possible to predict aggregate harm by specific actors from a range of samples of borderline content that each might be difficult to discern as harmful individually.”