Graham Macklin
Graham Macklin started in September 2017 and will work on the H2020 project Dialogue about Radicalisation and Equality (DARE) the first year. Macklin will be work package leader in WP 2 in this project.
His postdoctoral fellowship starts in September 2018 and investigates the evolving nature of transnational extreme right-wing politics and culture over three-quarters of a century, from 1945 to the present day. It charts the continued transnationalisation of extreme right ideology and action in response to the “threat” of globalization taking, as its starting point, the United Kingdom, an important “hub” for transnational activism and activity.
Combining historical research and social movement theory, the project will critically assess several hypotheses about the processes and mechanisms underpinning its impact, or otherwise, on the evolution of the post-war extreme right. It seeks to empirically document and analyses how various extreme right-wing transnational networks overlap and intersect with one another nationally, and internationally, and to account for the various positive and negative impacts they might have upon domestic political developments.
The aim of the project is to enhance our empirical and theoretical knowledge of how, and under which circumstances extreme right-wing organisations, groupuscules and individual activists, form alliances, coalitions and “networks”. It will investigate how such transnational actors learn from one another, how ideas do (and do not) diffuse internationally, and why certain networks atrophy whilst others persist, in order to ascertain the extent to which the extreme right-wing “movement” is genuinely “transnational” in nature.
Pietro Castelli Gattinara
The core question tackled by Pietro Castelli Gattinara’s project at C-REX concerns the relationship between far right parties, social movements and the so-called European migration crisis. Based on a mixed-method research design, the project will offer a comparative analysis of the construction of public debates on migration and asylum issues in Italy, France and the UK.
On the one hand, the project investigates how political crises shape far right politics: did the so-called refugee crisis lead to new types of political mobilization in the protest and electoral arena? How did far right parties and movements respond in terms of framing strategies and repertoires of action?
On the other, the project looks at how the far right contributes to constructing the ‘crisis’: to what extent far right collective actors ‘performed’ the refugee crisis in the public sphere? And how successful was their mobilization in protest and electoral politics in influencing mainstream discourse and public policy?
Gattinara started his three year project in November 2017.
Jacob Aasland Ravndal 
Ravndals postdoctoral research project is about the relationship between the militant left and the militant right in post-1990 Scandinavia, and between political extremism (ideas) and political violence (action) more generally. Existing social psychological research shows that the relationship between ideas and action is generally weak.
However, the notion that extreme ideas might lead to extremist violence remains strong among academics, experts and policymakers, although systematic empirical evidence supporting this notion is weak. Thus, to further explore the relationship between political ideas and political violence, this project will gather new evidence and develop new theory on the dynamics of left- and right-wing militancy in Scandinavia – what he term the theory of opposite attraction – whose main ambition is to help explain why episodes and cycles of militant mobilization and violence occur at particular times and in particular places.
In developing this theory, four sets of research questions will be pursued, covering four dimensions: ideas, emotions, organization, and relations. In pursuing answers to these questions, Ravndal will draw on existing theory from different fields, most notably political theory (set one), political psychology (set two), and social movement theory (sets three and four).
Ravndal starts in January 2018.