Emerging Threats to Democracy: Mapping the Intertwinement of Anti-Government Extremism and Right-Wing Terrorism in Western Europe’

In the aftermath of the 2011 July 22nd attack in Norway and the 2019 Christchurch shooting, numerous international bodies and media warned of ‘a dramatic rise in right-wing violence’ globally. However, much of the data used to inform such claims suffer from significant methodological flaws. By contrast, data from C-REX’s event-based Right-wing Terrorism and Violence (RTV) dataset, covering 18 countries in Western Europe in the 1990-2022 period, shows that right-wing terrorism and violence is in fact declining. Nevertheless, last year’s RTV Trend Report, which scrutinizes the current forms and directions of right-wing terrorism and violence in the region, hinted towards a new and emerging threat to democracy: anti-government extremism (AGE), which has provided a breeding ground for far-right actors to capitalize on. This presentation will have the RTV Trend Report 2023 as its point of departure, building on new and updated data from 2022. Changing patterns of perpetrator types and target groups in intercepted attack plots suggest that a new type of group-based threat is emerging in Western Europe, driven by a belief that the government has overreached its authority and threatens individual freedoms. Some of these plots were also in part encouraged by COVID-19 and anti-vaccine related conspiracy theories and grievances, putting not only state institutions and infrastructures at risk, but also elected officials and democracy at large. In addition to mapping trends and characteristics of the RTV/AGE intertwinement, the presentation will also discuss challenges related to conceptualizing and measuring this ‘new’ development.