Between civilisation, race, and nation: Transnational dimensions of far-right activism in post-Brexit Britain

Immigrants are usually studied as targets of the far right, not as participants in it. Addressing this gap, the article examines Polish immigrants’ involvement in Britain’s far-right politics, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted between 2023 and 2025. It explores how far-right actors stretch categories of ‘nativeness’ to include some immigrants, justifying this through civilisational or racial arguments depending on ideological profile and proximity to political mainstream, both logics ultimately fulfilling similar exclusionary functions. Moving from this general dynamic to the empirical cases, the article shows how Polish nationalist myths, reinterpreted and fused with British radical-right narratives, support civilisationist strategies of incorporation, while transnational appeals to whiteness underpin extreme-right cooperation and claims to equality with ‘native’ activists. The study demonstrates that immigrants’ engagement with the far right must be understood relationally, challenging assumptions that their political participation is uniformly democratic, and broadening debates on immigrant activism and the far right.