Teaching Common Sense: Practices of Epistemic Legitimation in the Transnational Far-Right Episteme

As the far-right becomes increasingly institutionalized into global politics a host of non-political party organizations have emerged to support the global movement. Increasingly, these organizations move from being fringe groups to well financed, professionalized institutions with their own research outputs, conferences, seminars, and events. However, in doing so, they challenge our existing understandings of epistemic legitimacy by rejecting more traditional forms and expressions of expertise. Drawing on the literature of the far-right as a social movement, epistemic communities, and policy learning, as well as a proprietary dataset of transnational far-right networks in Central and Eastern Europe since 2020, this paper proposes a three-part categorization of the activities of the emerging far-right episteme. First, the episteme performs a hybrid mode of traditional and far-right learning practices, adaptively drawing on existing norms of professionalism and epistemic legitimacy and merging them with far-right symbols and frames. Second, it serves a practical function of legitimizing explicitly partisan actors, helping to (re-)frame the activities of party-political activists as forms of knowledge. Thirdly, it acts as a central reserve of both theoretical and policy relevant knowledge which can be deployed across diverse contexts. As such, the transnational far-right epistemic community serves an irreplicable connecting function between otherwise disparate, locally cited, far-right epistemes.