(openDemocracy) Far-Right violence is on the rise in Europe. In fact, far-Right terror is one of the most important rising threats in the West, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, which compiles the Global Terrorism Index. In the period from 2002 to 2019, the US, Germany and the UK had the largest number of far-Right terror incidents in the West.
Worse than that, far-Right violence – decentralised anonymous attacks on political opponents and ethnic, religious and gender minorities – is significantly under-recorded for various institutional, methodological and conceptual reasons.
One reason is that most incidents of right-wing violence typically are not classed as terror attacks but as hate crimes or often even simply go into general criminal statistics.
Meanwhile, the prevalent approaches to deradicalisation build on the concept of ‘extremism’ to understand and counter political violence. But this perspective is often inadequate in light of the rising threat of right-wing violence and presents several major flaws. […]
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