Far Right Politics in Europe

Overview of course:

The resurgence of strong far right movements and parties constitutes one of the most significant political changes in contemporary democracies during the past decades. The far right’s come back has notably attracted interests from political scientists, sociologists and historians, although the majority of past research focuses on party and electoral politics.

This course not only covers this existing literature but also examines the radical right as a social movement rather than political parties, all over Europe and beyond. In particular, this course aims to provide researchers with basic knowledge of key topics in the scholarly literature on the far right, while fostering critical debate on some of the most contested issues surrounding it. It will focus on: i. conceptual issues, boundaries and definitions, ii. the causes (at the micro, meso and macro level) of far right mobilization, iii. the consequences and transnationalization of the far right,  as well as iv.  methods to study it (e.g. ethnography and interviews with radicals). The new concept of far right ‘movement-parties’ will be introduced, as a new lens though which address organizational transformations of the far right in contemporary democracies, as well as the relations between radical right parties and movements within changing European political and party systems. During the course we will link the theoretical debate with practical implementation through the illustration of comparative case studies on Europe and beyond, and applied research.

Course format:

The course will be divided into seven sessions of 3 hours each.  Every session will be primary organized as a collective discussion rather than a lecture. For each of the meetings, students are required to adopt a pro-active stance based on the reading of all the articles/chapters in the reading list. All students must do the readings and active participation in the seminar is compulsory.

More in particular, each session will begin with a presentation by the instructor, followed by a general discussion. Then, there will be time for one student to present one ‘work in progress’ product (e.g. a portion of the PhD project, a paper to be presented to a conference, etc.) authored by him/her and related to the topic of the course.