The Great Replacement and the Enjoyment of Crisis: Far-Right Conspiracy Theories in International Relations

From a ‘globalist’ new world order to the alleged ‘replacement’ of national populations through ‘dangerous alien Others’, conspiracy theories about global politics are thriving and increasingly entering the mainstream discourse. This paper analyses the ideological force, functions and effects of far-right conspiracy theories. Drawing on Lacanian Ontological Security Studies, it relates conspiracy theories to the ontological lack around which our identities and social orders are constituted. This lack generates the subject’s affective drive to identify with specific political projects that offer the elusive promise of ontological security. Given the regular frustration of this desire for self-coherence and certainty, this article understands conspiracy theories as affective coping mechanisms that simultaneously produce and reduce anxiety by driving the search for ontological completeness, while explaining this constant failure. Using the conspiracy theory of the great replacement as an empirical example, the article argues that conspiracy theories fulfil three central ideological functions: (1) grounding and essentialization, (2) Othering and (3) perpetuation of crisis through which they generate and sustain the radical investment in far-right projects.