Explaining diverse far-right strategies: The interpretation of multi-level discursive opportunities during the “refugee crisis”

Discursive opportunities have often been suggested as an alternative to political opportunities in explaining the contextual determinants of far right mobilization. This paper argues that existing applications of the discursive opportunity framework fail to take into account endogenous processes of interpretation, and how far right actors shift between discursive contexts. In the absence of these discussions, it is difficult to answer why largely similar actors, with similar goals, may diverge greatly in their choices of tactics. Applying the argument to three empirical case studies from the years around the so-called “refugee crisis”, the paper shows how different interpretations of discursive opportunities led local NIMBY groups, the Sweden Democrats, and the transnational Generation Identity to pursue very different strategies and to locate themselves on very different geographical and political scales in their campaigns against migrant accommodation. While these different interpretations can partly be explained by properties that were endogenous to the groups (goals, ideology, identities), they also related to the actions of other actors acting in the same contexts. The article thereby calls for a more thoroughly multi-level and relational understanding of the mechanisms that determine the effects of discursive opportunities on political protest.