Inside Contemporary Radical Right Politics: Issues and Challenges

Abstract

This panel aims to bring together multiple analyses of the contemporary radical right, rethinking conceptual concerns and proposing new empirical topics. The radical right frequently undermines institutional checks and balances, particularly judicial authority, and concentrates political power. Contemporary radical right tends to transform democratic tensions into mechanisms of victimization and domination, while operating under the symbolic promise of popular sovereignty and, often, within a claim for conservative and authoritarian values. These goals are often legitimized by a shift in discourse, in which social and class-based conflicts are replaced by antagonisms between 'friends' and 'enemies', that is a narrative that resonates with populism and sovereignism. Although those concepts are related to radical right politics, they are also contested. For example, populism invokes 'the people' as the ultimate authority; however, this category is ambiguous and unstable. Rather than resolving this ambiguity through increased democratic participation, populist claims redefine 'the people' as an exclusionary, homogeneous collective often aligned with national, cultural or moral boundaries. A similar complexity surrounds the concept of sovereignty, which appears to be a core tenet of the radical right. However, it is not always clear whether sovereignty claims are related to popular will, the nation or traditional values. In relation to the growing relevance of the radical right, knowledge production and intellectual authority also represent significant topics, though they have received limited attention from political sociologists. An interesting issue is how radical right ideas struggle within academia and media fields. The panel welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions on Europe and beyond dealing with these issues.

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