When Closure Becomes Opportunity: Societal Opportunity Structures in Far-Right Politics

This paper advances the concept of a Societal Opportunity Structure to rethink how radical and far-right movements operate in contexts where institutional access is constrained or deliberately avoided. It asks whether far-right empowerment is best understood as the result of expanded institutional opportunities, or rather as the strategic activation of far-right identities within non-institutional societal arenas precisely when political opportunities appear scarce. Rather than assuming that far-right mobilisation reflects favourable political opportunity structures, the paper shows how far-right actors can leverage moments of institutional closure, threat, and uncertainty into opportunities to resonate with anti-hegemonic and populist sentiments among diverse audiences. In doing so, they generate alternative pathways for informal alliances and mobilisation beyond formal politics. The analysis draws on five years of comparative ethnographic research (2017–2022) among radical groups on opposite ends of the political spectrum in Israel—religious conservative far-right and secular liberal far-left actors—supplemented by ongoing fieldwork following the October 2023 massacres and the Gaza war. The paper focuses in particular on radical settlers known as the “hilltop youth.” While often portrayed as beneficiaries of far-right empowerment, these actors not only violently negate Palestinian legitimacies but also reject Israeli state institutions as morally corrupt and illegitimate. Their mobilisation is therefore shaped less by perceived institutional openness than by a shared sense of threat to identity, territory, and moral order. The paper demonstrates how, under such conditions, hilltop activists compensate for institutional closure by activating societal opportunity structures embedded in weakly regulated arenas, dense communal infrastructures, moral economies, and culturally receptive micro-publics. Ethnographic evidence shows that activists engage in strategic identity and character work, flexibly modulating religious, nationalist, and populist repertoires to resonate with different publics while maintaining internal cohesion. These practices enable them to convert perceived threats into opportunities for alliance-building grounded in shared identities and affective bonds rather than policy demands, thereby bypassing conventional electoral cleavages. Analytically, the paper traces two interrelated processes through which far-right empowerment unfolds despite—and sometimes because of—institutional closure. First, it shows how activists interpret threat narratives as cues for identity modulation in response to their audiences across Israeli settlements, mixed Jewish–Arab cities, protest sites, social media, and informal community spaces, thereby activating latent societal support. Second, it demonstrates how radical ideas are diffused into social spaces where political intent remains ambiguous, allowing radical norms and practices to appear common-sense or apolitical to non-radical audiences. Through cultural forms such as music, rituals, volunteering, and everyday consumption, hilltop ideas circulate and reshape mainstream cultural environments. Theoretically, the paper contributes to social movement scholarship by integrating perceptions of threat and societal opportunity structures into analyses of far-right mobilisation. It offers a relational, actor-centred account of political opportunity under conditions of democratic erosion, showing how far-right actors translate extra-institutional mobilisation into political support and pave the way for institutional empowerment as societal alignments shift.