The “refugee crisis” as an opportunity structure for right-wing populist social movements: The case of PEGIDA

Bitschnau, Marco; Lichtenstein, Dennis; Fähnrich, Birte

doi:10.24434/j.scoms.2021.02.016

Cited by 20 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 32 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Consequently, PEGIDA received considerable national and international media attention in this period due to the ongoing humanitarian migrant crisis occurring in Europe arising primarily from the Syrian conflict. Employing this Islamophobic narrative of the threat posed by an overwhelming refugee crisis, (Bitschnau, 2021), branches of PEGIDA movements were founded in many European States including Ireland.…”

Section: Ireland's Interaction With Contemporary Right Wing Movementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ireland and Transnational Right-Wing Extremism: Steadfast Resilience or Blind Vulnerability?

2023

JMHDS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Throughout the last two decades the primary threats that has dominated the counter terrorism landscape internationally has been that of the challenge posed by radical Islamist related extremism. A particular focus on radical Islamist related extremism has been driven by the significant directed or inspired attacks perpetrated in the West by various Islamist extremist groupings and in particular those carried out by Al Qaeda and ISIL. Notwithstanding this, considerable concern is now orientating towards the upward trajectory of violent right-wing extremism (VRWE). This paper sets out to examine the presence and impact of transnational VRWE in Ireland and to assess whether VRWE is a threat which requires greater attention at a national level. This paper argues that all though the right wing has had limited political success in Ireland, a nascent transnational threat from VRWE can pose a threat to Irish security owing to its capacity to activate and mobilise violent political and social actions both in the physical and virtual environments. The role of the online environment as an enabling medium for the propagation and influence of right wing discourse is also a concern. Although efforts to combat spread of VRWE ideologies are advancing at the EU level, further efforts at a national level to control and regulate violent discourse and hate speech online are necessary to stem the influence of hateful and sometimes violent discourse as portrayed by right wing entities.

show abstract

Section: Ireland's Interaction With Contemporary Right Wing Movementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ireland and Transnational Right-Wing Extremism: Steadfast Resilience or Blind Vulnerability?

2023

JMHDS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It is argued that neoliberal society allows an ideological opening to racism “grounded on a collective socio-economic insecurity that helps facilitate a revival of pre-existing racialized imaginaries of solidarity, as nationalist ideological tropes have been utilized by political parties committed to implementing neoliberal policies as a way of mobilizing a ‘democratic’ constituency for it” (Davidson and Saull 2017: 716). Anti-Muslim and xenophobic tendencies further fuel the rise of the far Right, articulated in public discourses that stress security, health, and cultural threats, while foregrounding essentialist nativist, religious, patriarchic, and middle-class identity constructions (Sajjad, 2018: 54; Bitschnau, Lichtenstein and Fahnrich, 2021). The liberal democratic establishment of Europe proved to be more attentive to regressive demands and discourses, stressing restrictive measures, as it could not concede to progressivist social demands (Mondon and Winter, 2020: 122).…”

Section: Introduction: the “Refugee Crisis” In Europe: Political And ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Framing migration in the Greek press; An analysis of the ‘Evros events’ in left, liberal, and far-right newspapers

Kostopoulos

Mylonas

2022

Journalism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article we focus on one important event related to the Greek dimensions of the so called refugee crisis in Europe. This event took place during late February and March 2020 and is known as the Evros events that occurred when Turkey decided to open its European borders to the refugees. Greece responded by closing its land borders with Turkey, and by halting the asylum application process. The area surrounding the Evros River in Greece became heavily policed by the Greek police and the EU’s Frontex border police, further aided by various citizen militias consisting of Greek and other EU nationals. This research analyzes the newsmedia coverage of the specific incident through a qualitative frame analysis on news articles written by five Greek newspapers that have different political affiliations. The analysis then answers a two-fold research question: how did the Greek press frame the Evros events, and how did these frames contribute to the public debate around migration in the country.

show abstract

“…Framing processes have been investigated in the context of social movements (Bitschnau, Lichtenstein, and Fähnrich 2021;Gerbaudo 2017;Rane and Salem 2012). Uncertainty during these events offers attractive opportunities to promote the creation of frames, as it often involves the disintegration of long-standing norms and beliefs that have long been taken for granted in society .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying and Characterizing New Expressions of Community Framing during Polarization

Sarmiento

Bravo-Márquez

Graells-Garrido

et al. 2022

ICWSM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Chile experienced a series of important protests between October and December 2019. This social unrest, as it was called, was fueled by social inequity and radically affected the nation's status quo. A large portion of the population demanded a new Constitution and changes to the current government, whereas another part of the population rejected these social demands. This created a highly polarized scenario evidenced through online social media interactions. Analyzing controversial issues that emerge naturally from conversations in online communities can offer a more wide-scale understanding of today's political and societal discussions. Here, we analyze group polarization in social networks by studying the 2019 Chilean social unrest. Specifically, we propose an unsupervised approach for identifying and characterizing community framing (i.e., discovering and understanding polarized concepts). Our approach is based on the sequential application of community detection, topic modeling, and word embedding methods. The novelty of having an unsupervised approach is that it facilitates the performance of scalable and objective framing analyses with minimal human intervention, as it does not require prior domain or network knowledge. Using this methodology, we observe that an apparently similar conversation topic across communities can actually have completely different meanings to each group. We noted, for instance, that while an online community linked the term gente (people) with communism and terrorism, the other associated it with police and military oppression. In this direction, our work can help to contextualize real-world social issues in online platforms, describing how users discuss similar concepts with opposing views.

show abstract

The “refugee crisis” as an opportunity structure for right-wing populist social movements: The case of PEGIDA

Cited by 20 publications

References 32 publications

Ireland and Transnational Right-Wing Extremism: Steadfast Resilience or Blind Vulnerability?

Ireland and Transnational Right-Wing Extremism: Steadfast Resilience or Blind Vulnerability?

Framing migration in the Greek press; An analysis of the ‘Evros events’ in left, liberal, and far-right newspapers

Identifying and Characterizing New Expressions of Community Framing during Polarization

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About