- Shandon Harris-Hogan, C-REX, University of Oslo: Are there significant regional differences in far-right violence? Exploring incidents of severe violence across Australia, New Zealand and Canada
- Måns Lundstedt, University of Gothenburg: The diversification of contentious performances in anti-migrant violence
- Jacob Ravndal, Norwegian Police University College: Comparing the effects of plot inclusion on assessments of right-wing versus Islamist terrorist threats in Europe and the United States
- Stijn Willem van 't Land, Leiden University: Revisiting vicarious retribution: How do different terrorist attacks drive levels of hate crime?
Abstracts
Are there significant regional differences in far-right violence? Exploring incidents of severe violence across Australia, New Zealand and Canada
Shandon Harris-Hogan, C-REX, University of Oslo
It is widely acknowledged that there is a need to obtain more up-to-date research into far-right violence. One area where scholarly understandings of the far right remain underdeveloped is how violence motivated by far-right beliefs varies across different socio-political environments and geographical locations. To further develop these localized understandings, the following will analyse the prevalence of severe far-right violence across Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
These countries do not have any national monitoring systems for severe far-right violence, and until recent years, no far-right figure had been charged under terrorism legislation. Thus, the type and scale of violence actually occurring in these locations is not immediately clear. In order to fill this knowledge gap, this presentation with detail the scale of severe far-right violence across Australia, New Zealand and Canada across the past three decades. It will analyse trends in the levels of violence across time, explore what may have influenced these changes, and discuss the extent to which such trends might be considered transnational. The presentation will conclude by offering some preliminary thoughts regarding how this threat may be addressed through more targeted CVE policy and practice.
The diversification of contentious performances in anti-migrant violence
Måns Lundstedt, Anton Törnberg & Mattias Wahlström, University of Gothenburg.
This paper investigates how changes in the composition of movement actors and repertoires of action interplay during a period of shifting political and discursive contexts. To capture this, we study the diversification over time of anti-migrant violence in Sweden. By applying the concept of contentious performances to a continuous dataset of violent attacks in Sweden from 2007 to 2017, we argue that the ongoing mainstreaming of far-right politics, and specifically the heightened focus on migration issues around 2015, led to the emergence of a new and recurring mode of violence. Prior to this period, the typical incidents involved small- to medium-sized groups of youths openly confronting individual migrants and inhabited properties, engaging in minor acts of property damage and assault. Around 2015, this pattern was supplemented by a dramatic rise of actions in which individuals or small groups employed highly destructive violence against uninhabited properties, often without prior warning or subsequent claims of responsibility. These actors appear to be generally older than those engaged in larger scale but less severe violence. A provisional comparison of the local contexts surrounding both types of violence reveals that the highly destructive small-group violence is more commonly linked to preceding local nonviolent protest campaigns against migration. In contrast, the larger scale, yet less severe, violence appears to stem from group dynamics within subcultural settings.
Comparing the effects of plot inclusion on assessments of right-wing versus Islamist terrorist threats in Europe and the United States
Jacob Aasland Ravndal, Norwegian Police University College
(in collaboration with Jeff Gruenewald, Steven Chermak, Joshua D. Freilich, and Petter Nesser)
Whether to include foiled terrorist plots when assessing terrorist threats has recently been debated among terrorism scholars. Whereas the effect of plot inclusion has proven to be considerable when assessing Islamist threats in Western democracies, similar studies of right-wing terrorist plots are lacking. To narrow this gap, this paper fuses and synthesizes plot data from the United States Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), the Right-Wing Terrorism and Violence (RTV) dataset, and the Jihadi Plots in Europe Dataset (JPED), to assess the effects of including foiled terrorist plots when comparing the threats posed by right-wing and Islamist terrorists in Europe and the United States. Such systematic comparisons covering both right-wing and Islamist terrorism in both Europe and the United States have never before been done The analysis is expected to reveal critical differences regarding (1) the effect of plot inclusion on measures of right-wing versus Islamist terrorism, (2) how governmental counter-terrorism policies aimed at plot-detection shape the perceived threat from each type (right-wing and Islamist) differently across European countries and the United States, and (3) the underlying nature of international (Islamist) versus domestic (right-wing) terrorist threats.
Revisiting vicarious retribution: How do different terrorist attacks drive levels of hate crime?
Stijn Willem van 't Land, Leiden University
Terror attacks lead to temporal spikes of hate crimes. But the exact causal process linking terror attacks and hate crimes is still relatively unclear. Few existing studies that focus on temporal spikes of hate crimes after terrorist attacks compare impact across attacks or disaggregate data on hate crime victims based on characteristics like ethnicity or religion.
The present study critically reviews existing empirical research on temporal spikes in hate crimes following terror attacks, while incorporating findings from other studies on the effects of terrorism. The review will inform several hypotheses for statistical analysis, to answer: What kind of terrorist attacks leads to what kind of hate crimes?
The study concentrates on the impact of lethal terrorist attacks in the Global North on hate crime in the Netherlands[1] from 2015-2022. We suspect that incident-level factors of a terrorist attack exert heterogeneous effects and impact the nature and intensity of temporal spikes in hate crimes. The study aims to 1) assess the validity of the theory of ‘vicarious retribution’ in relation to hate crime following terrorist attacks; 2) leverage a richer diversity in data about lethality, perpetrator and targets of terrorist attacks and their relation to ensuing hate crimes than previous studies.