Grievances, Conspiracy Theories and Social Exclusion in Northern Europe

It is a welll-known fact that the far-right routenily exploits public dissatisfaction and social exclusion as mobilisaiton strategies for electoral and popular support. Less known perhaps is how this instrumentalisation of dissatisfaction functions especially well through conspiracy theories. This paper looks at said far-right conspiracy theories, usually on politically salient topics, and analyses how at a user level they interact with experiences of social exclusion and are developed by otherwise politically average citizens in response to insecurity within society, and the role they play in creating individual resilience. Research into conspiracy theories have tended to analyse conspiracy either in terms of the role it plays in extremist groups or networks, as a security threat, or for the potential threat it poses to society, community cohesion and trust in politics. But there is also literature pointing our that far right political groups and extremist ones feed off each other´s use and dissemination of conspiracy theories and misinformation. Indeed, there are sinficant instrumental and ideological connections between the political far right and right wing extremist groups, at both the local and transnational levels. This paper looks at how conspiracy theories – even those that are linked to extremism – can operate as a form of psychological resilience-building, providing the means to manage and respond to patterns of social exclusion. How do consiracy theories serve to validate political grievances at the local level? And how does this usage relate to wider trends in far right political discourses and mobilisation streategies? Through a large N of interviews with individuals linked to conspiracy narratives in the Netherlands, the UK, Denmark and Norway, conducted as part of the EU Commission-funded DRIVE project, the findings suggest that conspiracy theories operate in response to a range of societal concerns and experiences – including housing and job insecurity, discrimination and political inequality. In doing so, they evidence conspiracy as often acting as a means by which individuals can manage experiences of social exclusion, across various national contexts. This paper contributes and speaks to the international far right literature in two ways. Firstly, it provides an empirical basis for ongoing debates on conspiracy theories and misinformation as "tools" of the far right, by exploring conspiracy theories as a source of psycho-social resilience towards certain trends in society, that the far right often mobilises as political narratives: job and housing insecurity, immigration, etc. And secondly, it advances new insights into how the transnational political far right capitalises on and even promotest extremist narratives about certain issues as cleavages to mobilise political support. Finally, our findings have a range of implications, nuancing our understanding of the relationship between conspiracy theories in extremism and politics, analysing the role that social exclusion plays in the spread of conspiracy theories, as well as offering opportunities for reassessing how to build psychological and community forms of resilience in response to extremism.