Far-right contention in civil society: multiple lenses on action repertoires, actors, and targets

Abstract Over the past decade, the far right has been on the rise in civil societies across Europe. Civil society organizations have been challenged by the far right in governments, political parties, and their own ranks. However, little systematic research exists on how the far right stirs conflict within civil society. Civil society research has tended to ignore “uncivil” society and instead focused on social capital and cohesion. Research on the noninstitutional side of the far right has been growing but largely neglected the consequences for established civil society organizations and their members. We address these gaps by providing a conceptual framework and a methodology for studying the far right in civil society, which is applied to a case study. First, we construct a conceptual framework that adapts the contentious-politics paradigm to the study of civil society. We delineate far-right contention within civil society and construct typologies of the action repertoires, actors, and targets. Second, we develop a methodology that combines different lenses to expand our view on far-right contention in civil society. We propose a mixed-methods research design for mapping far-right contentious events. Third, we apply our conceptual framework and methodology to the case of Germany by empirically mapping the action repertoires, actors, and targets. Our findings fundamentally shift the scholarly understanding of the far right in civil society: We find that far-right contention in civil society goes well beyond adversarial actions by far-right actors. This has important implications for researchers and practitioners.