International nets and national links: The global rise of the extreme right - introduction to the special issue

Work on this special issue has spanned two years, bookended by two highly mediatized, violent, extreme right-wing attacks, perpetrated on opposite sides of the globe. We began in March 2019, within days of the mass murder of 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, committed by an Australian white supremacist with various international links, inspired by virtually global Islamophobia propagated via the internet (Poynting 2020). The ‘Christchurch massacre’ was itself modeled on the atrocities of 2011 in Oslo and Utøya, Norway: the sharing of right-wing racist ideology and propaganda themes was starkly obvious. Both atrocities took place in economically developed liberal democracies, though this is not so of all the rise of the extreme right,globally (populist regimes in Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Modi’s Hindu nationalist-dominated India, each with characteristic racisms, are cases in point).