The violence of ‘Non-violence’: A socio-technical study of the ethnocultural politics and strategies of New Right identitarianism.

Abstract

Prior to live-streaming his deadly attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Brenton Tarrant uploaded a manifesto online rooted in ‘identitarian’ narratives. Promoting the defence of European identity against the threat of a foreign ‘invasion’, identitarianism is a transnational intellectual and activist movement that, significantly, does not advocate violence. Instead, identitarians utilise the web and its related technologies to engage in a ‘metapolitical’ strategy, advancing ‘softer’ and less explicitly hateful ideals – such as ‘identity’, ‘values’, and ‘culture’ – in an attempt to normalise an ideology that has ethnic separatism at its core. The danger of identitarianism and its New Right separatist politics lies in its capacity to mobilise a transnational collective, appeal to a broad range of audiences, and facilitate the inclusion of harmful narratives into mainstream discourse. Through a digital ethnographic and discourse-analytic study of the identitarian–New Right online ecosystem, this research seeks to contribute to understandings of far-right mobilisation online and develop a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the threat posed by ‘non-violent’ manifestations of far-right extremism.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Anita Lavorgna: orcid.org/0000-0001-8484-1613

ORCID for Mark Weal: orcid.org/0000-0001-6251-8786

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