Environmental imagery, far-right ideologies, and the conflict-peace-climate nexus in Europe

This article examines how European radical right political parties and extreme right movements use environment-themed imagery to disseminate alternative narratives about climate change and other environmental issues. Through visual discourse analysis of purposively selected images from both parliamentary parties and extreme right groups, the analysis reveals how such visual narratives link ecological concerns with culturally and socio-economically exclusivist and supremacist political messaging. Building on the now-substantial scholarship on far-right ecologism and far-right visual environmental communication, the article’s distinctive contribution is to read these communications through the lens of the ‘conflict-peace-climate nexus’ debated within conflict, security, and development scholarship. It shows how far-right visual communications operate through three primary mechanisms: scapegoating strategies that displace responsibility for environmental degradation onto racialised populations; the appropriation of legitimate concerns about neo-colonial development through banal nationalist imagery; and the exploitation of empirical complexity and contestation within conflict-peace-climate debates to propagate narratives that undermine collective climate action. The analysis further identifies a division of visual labour across the far-right spectrum, in which radical right parties encode exclusion implicitly while extreme right movements render it explicit, with significant implications for climate policy, environmental peacebuilding, and conflict prevention.