Abstract
This chapter presents selected findings from a large multi-method study on the narratives and networks of far-right movements in Victoria, Australia. Drawing on a systematic analysis of the textual content of 12 far-right groups’ Facebook pages, it presents a heuristic typology differentiating between three clusters of far-right groups: anti-Islam, cultural superiority and racial superiority groups. The chapter offers empirical evidence on how certain mobilisation themes, present to a varying degree across all far-right groups, shift over time. While there was a consistent decrease in the prevalence of anti-Islam messaging between 2015 and 2017, issues around crime and violence as well as gender and sexuality have gained prominence in anti-Islam and cultural superiority type groups. This is also attributed to the way in which many far-right groups strategically respond to new discursive opportunities, afforded to them by heightened public discourses, for example, on same-sex marriage or alleged ‘gang crimes’ in Victoria.
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Notes
- 1.
In response to the rise of right-wing parties across Europe in recent years, the scholarly attention has shifted more towards the phenomenon of right-wing populism. Populism is commonly understood as ‘a political style [rather] than a manifestation of consistent political substance’ (Alvares and Dahlgren 2016: 49; also Nadeau and Helly 2016). While there are numerous definitions of populism, many of them combine at least two elements, a focus on ‘the people’ and anti-elitism (Sheets et al. 2016). Albertazzi and McDonnell’s definition also contains these two key features (2008: 3): ‘[Populism is] an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogenous people against a set of elites and dangerous “others” who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice’.
- 2.
Voogt (2017: 34), from the perspective of an expert non-governmental organisations specialised in fighting online hatred, makes a similar distinction ‘between traditional White supremacist far-right groups and the increasingly active anti-Muslim groups’, without claiming this would capture all active far-right groups in Australia.
- 3.
We are aware that Facebook is not the primary online platform for most extreme right-wing, White superiority groups, which tend to be more active on Twitter or in closed online forums or blogs. For methodological reasons we focussed on only one social media platform and chose Facebook, which was the most prominent platform for most of far-right groups in Australia.
- 4.
‘All words’ refers to all word stems as defined by NVivo 10 and excludes stop words (words like ‘and’ or ‘is’ that were not included in the word frequency analysis).
- 5.
Apex was the name of an informal group of young people of various ethnocultural backgrounds who were involved in a number of crimes (e.g. robbery, carjacking, assault) that attracted a lot of media attention especially in 2016 and, to some extent, in 2017 and 2018, and were typically portrayed—in a racialising manner—as ‘African gangs’.
- 6.
We are aware that many of the far-right groups under analysis talk about homosexuality or marriage also within their anti-Islam messaging. Despite the resulting inaccuracies, we consider a word frequency analysis to be suitable to explore trends and developments in the references to such themes.
- 7.
Other word frequencies also increased, without any obvious immediate relation to the terrorist attack; the word Burka, for example, was used much more frequently in the week after the attack than the week before (proportional frequency increased by 121 per cent).
- 8.
We excluded the posts and comments of the far-right anti-Islam group PDLA from this analysis because the group became largely dysfunctional in 2017; not including the PDLA avoids that the data comparison is skewed.
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Peucker, M., Smith, D., Iqbal, M. (2019). Not a Monolithic Movement: The Diverse and Shifting Messaging of Australia’s Far-Right. In: Peucker, M., Smith, D. (eds) The Far-Right in Contemporary Australia. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8351-9_4
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