Dr William Allchorn is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at Richmond, the American University in London and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Policing Institute for the Eastern Region, Anglia Ruskin University. He is an expert on radical-right extremist social movements in the UK, Western Europe and globally. He has most recently advised the UK, US and Australian governments on their approaches to radical-right extremism. His first book, Anti-Islamic Protest in the UK: Policy Responses to the Far Right was published by Routledge in 2018. Recently, William’s research has shifted to studying the violent far right threat landscape. His latest book, Moving beyond Islamist Extremism – Assessing Counter Narrative Responses to the Global Far Right, was published by Ibidem (an imprint of Columbia University Press) in early 2022.
Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?
Owing to key electoral breakthroughs in France, Austria and Italy, there has been, what is called, an explosion in literature on far-right extremism over the past two-and-a-half decades. This has ostensibly focused on party political manifestations of the so-called third (between the early 1980s to the early 2000s) and fourth waves (from 2010s to the present day) of far-right extremism. Key debates that have received sustained attention within scholars in the field of far-right studies include how we conceptualise the different faces of contemporary right-wing extremist ideologies, whether economics or culture has led to its resurgence, and the political (dubbed internal and external supply-side) factors that have accounted for cross-national variations in breakthrough and success.
One of the key criticisms made of the early literature, however, was its ‘breathless’ band wagoning on contemporary developments. Instead of ‘serious scientific study, normative and emotional viewpoints were a sign of a literature dominated by ‘avowed opponents’. This has been reflected in later literature. Little has been written, for example, on the less visible non-party political manifestations of the extreme right, such as the EDL. Moreover, there is only a budding, but so far underdeveloped, empirical literature assessing the effectiveness of responses and the democratic effects of the current extreme right ‘threat’.
Happily, there has been a change in the shifting sands of scholarship on far-right extremism more recently that has taken a closer look at how external actors’ responses to the far-right enable and inhibit the rise of the movement, as well as breaking down the dichotomy of culture versus economics when explaining its rise, and the role of far-right actors in International Relations that has really shifted the scope of focus of studies. Moreover, there have been agenda-setting articles that have pushed the boundaries of what we conceive as the far-right beyond Eurocentrism, Electoralism and Externalism.
How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?
In 2024, the global radical right has rarely been far from the headlines. Recent electoral victories in Portugal and The Netherlands show a continued appetite for authoritarian, populist and nativist politics and the splintering of the right within domestic electorates further solidifies the position of fringe ideologies apace. Moreover, we see such trends illustrated internationally with the rise of illiberal authoritarian governments in Hungary, India and Russia. Whether it’s the hype surrounding the performance of national-populist parties in the forthcoming European Parliamentary elections or the performance of such parties in Europe at the national level, we should be worried – we are living in an unprecedented moment; one defined by phenomenal uncertainty and chaos where the edifice of the old liberal order is starting to crack, and a new illiberal one is appearing in the midst of our politics and institutions. Such is the complexity and seriousness of these shifts that perhaps now more than at any other time quality analyses are needed to make sense of the underlying currents and to inform our own engagement with this issue in the public sphere.
The most influential scholars that have prompted shifts in my thinking on the far right and its role within democracies have been the works of Cas Mudde, Elizabeth Ivarsflaten and Ami Pedahzur. Each have given significant understanding to the role of the far right, how the far right overcomes its reputational challenges in order to place itself at the heart of democratic systems, and how immunized systems might and could work to resist further encroachment and erosion of our democratic institutions as the global radical right continues its march into the halls of power. The major shift that I have observed over the last ten or so years is how the parliamentary far right (e.g. national populist parties) has gone from an “outsider” to an “insider” threat. Moreover the extra-parliamentary far right (e.g. street movements and terror cells) has also........