Soft Power, Hard Ideology: Visual Strategies and Symbolic Politics in the Contemporary Far Right

Abstract

This panel examines how contemporary right-wing and extremist movements strategically deploy visual imagery, symbols, and everyday cultural codes to normalise, mainstream, and disseminate their ideologies across digital platforms. Moving beyond explicit political messaging, papers explore how seemingly innocuous or affectively charged content - from cute animals to historical symbols to nature imagery - becomes a vehicle for ideological transmission and identity construction. The panel brings together diverse case studies that reveal a common pattern: the use of "soft" visual strategies to advance "hard" ideological positions. Papers examine how European far-right leaders leverage the cuteness of cats to humanize themselves and create low-threshold entry points into extremist worldviews; how masculine identity is performed and negotiated through images of dogs within extreme-right communities; how medieval Templar symbolism is memefied to mobilise young male audiences in Spanish far-right spaces; how nature imagery on social media platforms can be appropriated to undermine progressive environmental movements; and how anti-American political cartoons in Pakistan construct national identity through visual metaphor while reinforcing conservative nationalism.

Title	Details
“He Who Loves Animals Cannot Hate People”: Cuteness, Affect, and Far-Right Normalisation Through Cat Content	View Paper Details
Memes and History Lessons: Templar Symbolism and the Banalization of Extremist Discourse in the Spanish Online Far Right Milieu	View Paper Details
Nationalism as Anti-Americanism in Pakistani Political Cartoons	View Paper Details
Same View, Different Visions – Visual Communication and Appropriation of Nature Content on Social Media	View Paper Details
Who’s the Top Dog? Dogs as Representation of Identity and Masculinity in Extreme-Right Imagery	View Paper Details