2022-2 Extreme and radical-right in lusotopy spaces
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Deadline for the submission of abstracts: August 31st, 2021
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Deadline for the submission of articles: December 31st, 2021
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Coordinators: Bruno Madeira (CITCEM-UP/Universidade do Minho) and Odilon Caldeira Neto (LAHPS/Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora).
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The abstracts must not exceed 2.500 characters (with spaces) and include a short CV (500 characters with spaces).
Populist, national-populist, illiberal, radical, authoritarian, extreme, ultraconservative, fascist, neo-fascist, post-fascist [Eatwell, Goodwin, 2018; Mudde, 2019; Revelli, 2017; Traverso, 2019]: these are a few names that have been used in the Twenty-First century to characterize the rising right-wing. These have been obtaining significative electoral results in Europe, as they have had in the United States of America and Brazil – not to forget other cases of electoral success, like the Philippines or India [Caiani; Císař, 2019; Ignazi, 2003, Mammone; Godin; Jenkins, 2013; Stockemer, 2019]. This growth comes with an increase of their militant bases, and, at the same time, a growing curiosity of the press. The communications and propaganda strategy deeply ingrained on the Internet is a distinctive feature of new post-fascist parties and movements’ activism. [Caiani; Parenti, 2016; Nagle, 2017].
Indeed, movements, parties, and leaders of these rights tend to present multiple identities, even if they are all based on specific local nationalisms. However, the efforts to, at an international level, intensify contacts and relationships, create solidarity networks and present a programmatic and political articulation, have also been notorious. For this special issue, we are interested specifically in the relations that, in the context of lusotopy, the radical rights have been establishing with their counterparts – not only in the space in question but in an international context.
We intend to question and typify, based on the several national and transnational experiences, the (re)emergence and the “success” of this kind of right wings. In other words, we are asking for a reflection on the national asymmetries recorded by the many rights, radical and post-fascists, as well as for the consideration, in light of the objectives proposed by them, about what can or cannot be considered a triumph for them. Does it consist only of electoral victories and government formations? Can a triumph be the ability to influence the mediatic agenda? Or, if we think in the Portuguese case, is it already a victory having, after 45 years, a representative elected in the Assembly of the Republic? And, from an organizational point of view, how do these political movements reproduce ancient forms of organization, or on the contrary, create new mobilization structures?
In the Euro-American world, the political, social, cultural, and economic breeding ground for this resurgence of the radical rights was the growth of economical inequalities, the decomposition of the classical political oligarchy, the loss of political representativity, the historical revisionism, the disputes around memory and the politics of fear and vigilance [Agamben, 2018; Furedi, 2018; Zuboff, 2020].
Recently, the impact of digital social networks was seen in the creation of a new political culture leaning towards confrontation, verbal abuse, the exclusion of the “other”, spreading fake news; in other words, the construction and social reinforcement of prejudice.
In the context of lusotopy, we face several challenges when we study radical rights. First, we need to question what right-wing and/or extreme-right in Africa is. While it seems obvious that the Western criteria are not the more suitable for assessing the nature of the African regimes and political parties, the mere reflection of whether those systems are democratic or not also seems insufficient to think the continent politically [Dunn; Englebert, 2019; Van Wyk, 2018]. How can one classify, for example, RENAMO (Mozambique) and UNITA (Angola)? In the African universe, specifically in Mozambican and Angolan contexts, would it make sense to mobilize concepts such as “conservatism”, “right”, “nationalism” or “economic liberalism” to think about these parties?
In the second place, in the Portuguese and Brazilian cases, it would be interesting to compare the different roles of the leaders that represent these rights, the influence of the specific context where they appeared as well as the uses the movements do of the authoritarian pasts to justify part of their project.
We welcome then contributions around three thematic axes, calling for a strong empirical component through which we can associate them to:
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Political-partisanship and associative expressions of the extreme and radical rights in lusotopy: How are these organizations structured? Which are the “networks” (Sawicki, 1997) that comprise them?
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Circulation of ideas and practices between the extreme and radical rights in lusotopy: Does it make sense to think about the circulations within lusotopy or does the referral universe of these rights depends mainly on its European / American anchorage? Which are the frames of thought circulating in lusotopy?
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The battle over memory: How do the radical rights revisit, mobilize and rely on the authoritarian pasts memory to build their project? What is the affiliation of these movements with the fascists’ experiences? How colonization or decolonization is (re)questioned by these radical rights?
References
Agamben, Giorgio (2018), Estado de Excepção, Lisboa, Edições 70.
Caiani, Manuela; Parenti, Linda (2016), European and American Extreme Right Groups and the Internet, Nova Iorque, Routledge.
Caiani, Manuela; Císař, Ondřej (2019), Radical Right Movement Parties in Europe, Nova Iorque, Routledge.
Dunn, Kevin C.; Englebert, Pierre (2019), Inside African Politics, Londres, Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Eatwell, Roger; Goodwin, Matthew (2018), National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Londres, Pelican.
Furedi, Frank (2018), How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the 21st Century, London, Bloomsbury Continuum.
Ignazi, Piero (2003), Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe, Nova Iorque, Oxford University Press.
Mammone, Andrea; Godin, Emmanuel; Jenkins, Brian (2013), Varieties of Right-Wing Extremism in Europe, Nova Iorque, Routledge.
Mudde, Cas (2019), The Far Right Today, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Nagle, Angela (2017), Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, Alresford, Zero Books.
Revelli, Marco (2017), Populismo 2.0, Turim, Einaudi.
Rosenthal, Lawrence (2020), Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism, Nova Iorque, The New Press.
Sawicki, Frédéric (1997), Les réseaux du Parti socialiste, Paris, Belin, 1997.
Stockemer, Daniel (2019), Populism Around the World: A Comparative Perspective, Cham, Springer.
Traverso, Enzo (2019), The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right, Londres, Verso.
Van Wyk, Jo-Ansie (2018), «Political Parties and Democracy in Africa». In Oloruntoba, Samuel Ojo; Falola, Toyin (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of African Politics, Governance and Development, Nova Iorque, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 485-501.
Wacquant, Loïc (2009), Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Durham, Duke University Press.
Yanay, Niza (2013), The Ideology of Hatred: The Physic Power of Discourse, New York, Fordham University Press.
Zuboff, Shoshana (2020), A Era do Capitalismo da Vigilância, Lisboa, Relógio d’Água.



