Understanding Right-Wing Terrorism: Unfolding Knowledge in Time and Space

In early November 2011, the German terrorist organisation ‘National Socialist Underground’ (NSU) was uncovered. More than a dozen crimes – including a murder series and three bombings that targeted residents and citizens with Turkish roots – have been attributed to the NSU in the weeks, months, and years since. The trial against the only surviving member of the core trio of the group, Beate Zschäpe, and four supporters at the Regional High Court in Munch ended after more than 5 years in July 2018, though the verdicts have not yet been validated. The discovery of the perpetrators immediately prompted the re-labelling of the crimes (that had previously been predominantly located within a criminal ‘migrant milieu’) as “right-wing terrorism” across the political, societal, academic, and legal spheres. Reflecting on this dynamic behind the NSU case, the core argument of this paper, drawn from a book manuscript on ‘the politics of reading right-wing terrorism’, is that knowledge of and responses to the phenomenon in western-democratic states are fundamentally shaped by when, where, and how an act of violence is defined and categorised as right-wing terrorism. I develop this account through a conceptual approach to right-wing terrorism as a temporalized and spatialized process, and make a case for why this process is different depending on the ideological variant in question.