The far right is rising worldwide, gaining widespread support and becoming part of domestic governments. It is also increasingly challenging international institutions and organisations. Their foreign policy preferences and strategies have only recently attracted scholarly attention, mainly under the rubric of 'populism'. Therefore, we are still unaware of the nature of far-right challenges to International Organizations, the far right’s strategic transnational cooperation, or their effect on the dynamics of international conflict. This workshop fosters dialogue between international relations and comparative politics researchers to systematically understand and evaluate the sources and implications of the international politics of the far right.
The workshop aims to advance explanations about the international politics of the far right. To do so, it engages with comparative politics and international relations debates having different key assumptions. First, the workshop aims to understand how far-right groups' 'thick' ideology matters for international politics, compared to the 'thin' ideology of populism. Disentangling these two notions will help determine the effects of far-right ideology on international institutions and how populist strategising serves as a tool to realise ideological preferences. Second, the workshop explores whether far-right actors’ positions and strategies vary according to specific global issues (migration, gender, or conflict behaviour), which helps us understand whether their preferences are rigid or have distinct patterns on different policy issues. Third, the workshop investigates the 'resilience' of international institutions to far-right challenges by inquiring about their adaptation or containment strategies to fundamental challenges. Studying institutional reactions to far-right politics reveals under what conditions their ideas become normalised or rejected. Fourth, it aims at exploring both broader patterns of cooperation (IO withdrawals, forum-shifting, etc.) and more piecemeal changes (funding, staffing, etc.) to understand the nature of the current 'crisis of multilateralism', of which the far right is a primary driver. Fifth, the workshop will examine how international developments affect the far right regarding its policy preferences, opportunities for contestation, and alliance formation. This workshop will provide essential insights into political dynamics more widely and constitutes a novel research agenda of interest for fields related to (and intersecting with) international relations and comparative politics.
Bibliography
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Castelli Gattinara, Pietro, Caterina Froio, and Andrea L. P. Pirro. 2022. “Far‐right Protest Mobilisation in Europe: Grievances, Opportunities and Resources.” European Journal of Political Research 61 (4): 1019–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12484.
Chiru, Mihail, and Natasha Wunsch. 2023. “Democratic Backsliding as a Catalyst for Polity-Based Contestation? Populist Radical Right Cooperation in the European Parliament.” Journal of European Public Policy 30 (1): 64–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2021.1984546.
Chryssogelos, Angelos. 2017. “Populism in Foreign Policy.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, by Angelos Chryssogelos. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.467.
Copelovitch, Mark, and Jon C. W. Pevehouse. 2019. “International Organizations in a New Era of Populist Nationalism.” The Review of International Organizations 14 (2): 169–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-019-09353-1.
Destradi, Sandra, David Cadier, and Johannes Plagemann. 2021. “Populism and Foreign Policy: A Research Agenda (Introduction).” Comparative European Politics 19 (6): 663–82. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-021-00255-4.
McDonnell, Duncan, and Annika Werner. 2019. International Populism: The Radical Right in the European Parliament. London: Hurst & Company.
Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Raunio, Tapio, and Wolfgang Wagner. 2021. “Contestation over Development Policy in the European Parliament.” JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 59 (1): 20–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13138.
Wajner, Daniel F, Sandra Destradi, and Michael Zürn. 2024. ‘The Effects of Global Populism: Assessing the Populist Impact on International Affairs’. International Affairs 100 (5): 1819–33. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae217.
1: Why and how do far-right foreign policy preferences differ from other groups?
2: Why and how do far-right foreign policy preferences differ from other groups?
3: What kind of strategies do they employ across different policy fields?
4: What effects can we observe on international institutions (design, policy output, and institutional resilience)?
5: How, in reverse, do international institutions shape the far-right’s international politics?
1: Far-right parties’ preferences on and strategies in international affairs and various policy fields
2: Multilateral, minilateral, informal, and ad hoc cooperation pursued by far-right parties or governments
3: Networks of far-right parties and/or non-state actors and their transnational politics
4: States’, international organization secretariats’, and non-state actors’ responses to the far-right
5: Institutional resilience to fundamental challenges posed by far-right parties
6: Funding and staffing in times of the “crisis of multilateralism”
7: Mainstream parties’ reactions to far-right positions and strategies on international issues
8: Global governance and patterns of ideological variation of the Far Right
