Far-right anniversary politics and social media: The Alternative for Germany’s contestation of the East German past on Twitter

Richardson-Little, Ned; Merrill, Samuel; Arlaud, Leah

doi:10.1177/17506980221133518

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 32 publications

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“…The uses and abuses of memory on the part of the far‐right have been increasingly explored in recent years, with studies examining, to mention just a few examples, reassessments of the colonial experience in Italy (Griffini, 2022), France (Flood, 2005; Flood & Frey, 2002) and the Netherlands (Couperus & Tortola, 2019); of fascism in Italy (Bolzonar, 2023; Broder, 2023), Germany (Vees‐Gulani, 2021; Volk, 2022), France (Golsan, 2017) and Hungary (Pető, 2022); and of communism in Germany (Richardson‐Little et al, 2022) or Poland (Koryci, 2019). Needless to say, developments in the modes and channels of political communication, above all the expansion of social media, often play a large role in reinforcing tactics of reassessment, manipulation, and weaponization of the past (Esteve‐Del‐Valle & Costa Lopez, 2023; Rensmann, 2017; Richardson‐Little et al, 2022). In the next sections, we will zoom in on the specific case of Italy and the Fratelli d'Italia party, as a way to better dissect and understand such dynamics of far‐right memory politics and entrepreneurship.…”

Section: Memory Politics and The Far‐rightmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political violence in far‐right memory: Fratelli d'Italia's remembrance of the Primavalle arson

Marchese,

Tortola

2024

Contemporary European Politics

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The relationship between the (populist) far right and the past is the subject of increasing scholarly interest. The deployment, reassessment and at times manipulation of historical memory, in particular, is an important factor in the politics and mainstreaming of the European far right. The latter has a lot to gain from any shifts in collective memory placing nations' dark and shameful past in a more benevolent light. At the same time, far‐right actors play an active role in such shifts, by routinely (ab)using the memory of the past for electoral gain. This article contributes to the research agenda on the memory politics of the far right by examining how Fratelli d'Italia – Italy's foremost far‐right party – remembers and narrates the ‘years of lead’, a tumultuous and hotly contested chapter in the country's political history. More precisely, our analysis zooms in on the powerful trope of ‘secular martyrdom’ attached to the memory of that period, and looks at how this idea is mobilised by Fratelli d'Italia via the examination of a particularly tragic episode of the years of lead, namely, the 1973 Primavalle arson.

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Section: Memory Politics and The Far‐rightmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political violence in far‐right memory: Fratelli d'Italia's remembrance of the Primavalle arson

Marchese,

Tortola

2024

Contemporary European Politics

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The Post-Communist Far Right and Its Transnational Linkages

Paulovičová,

Soroka

2024

Nationalities Papers

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In this special issue, our contributors move the academic conversation beyond methodological nationalism and approaches that analyze far-right movements only within their respective state contexts by interrogating the circulation of ideologies, funds, and people across sociopolitical boundaries. Our goal is to scrutinize the far right in post-communist Eastern Europe by examining the multitudinous and multidirectional ties that exist between groups at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. Attention, moreover, is paid not just to those factors that facilitate such linkages, but also to the obstacles that hamper these flows via various detours, omissions, and other forms of resistance. In this introduction, we offer a theoretical overview and discussion of contributors’ findings to argue that conduits for the dissemination of far-right discursive frames are hardly unidirectional in nature. As a result, the transitological narratives of progress and regress typically invoked to explain the emergence of the far right offer only a partial understanding of how it mobilizes, builds alliances, and circulates ideas. We unpack the conceptual pitfalls and fallacies of transitological narratives and instead foreground the concept of multidirectionality, which opens up new avenues through which to understand how far-right groups mobilize and disseminate their narratives.

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Bordering the GDR: Everyday Transnationalism, Global Entanglements and Regimes of Mobility at the Edges of East Germany

Richardson-Little

Stokes

2023

Cent Eur Hist

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No state has ever been as identified with its borders as the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The guest editors’ introduction to this special issue analyzes the development of the historiography of the borders of the GDR, showing how new approaches to the country's history have also impacted scholarship on the everyday history of the border. We argue for approaches that understand the border simultaneously as a site of conflict and cooperation and that situate the border not just alongside its geographical neighbors, but within broader flows of natural resources, pollution, narcotics, migration, and disease. Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of border studies, we argue that global approaches can help contextualize the exceptional and encourage scholars to ask new questions about which elements of GDR bordering practices were part of the globally emerging normalcy of border regimes, and which were unique to East Germany. In these ways, this special issue seeks to reveal new aspects of East German history and, in turn, make the GDR more legible within border studies.

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Far-right anniversary politics and social media: The Alternative for Germany’s contestation of the East German past on Twitter

Cited by 3 publications

References 32 publications

Political violence in far‐right memory: Fratelli d'Italia's remembrance of the Primavalle arson

Political violence in far‐right memory: Fratelli d'Italia's remembrance of the Primavalle arson

The Post-Communist Far Right and Its Transnational Linkages

Bordering the GDR: Everyday Transnationalism, Global Entanglements and Regimes of Mobility at the Edges of East Germany

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