Introduction by Jamey Essex (University of Windsor), Carolyn Gallaher (American University) and Jason Luger (Northumbria University)

Almost two centuries ago, Marx and Engels conjured an image of a Europe haunted by the spectre of Communism. The haunted ground was the meeting of two worlds, a dying one, dominated by feudalism, and a new one, driven by capitalist accumulation. It’s not surprising that Marx and Engels (1967:83) used the phrase “[a]ll that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” to describe the transition in the Communist Manifesto. The emergence of capitalism led to new economic and social relations on a societal level and begat a new moral order to ground and justify the changes. It even disrupted society at the ontological level. Laclau and Mouffe (1985), though writing contra Marxism, capture this ontological disorientation through the figure of the peasant. In feudal Europe, peasants were required to have a lord—a custom/rule that trapped peasants in place, but also gave them a legitimate position within the feudal system. The land enclosure movement in the 18^th and 19^th centuries not only destroyed feudal tenure; it also negated a core identity within it. As Laclau and Mouffe (1985:125) explain, “it is because a peasant cannot be a peasant that an antagonism exists with the landowner expelling him from his land”.

In many respects, our time feels similarly disrupted, if in a much earlier stage of progression. The neoliberal order seems near collapse (Gerstle 2022), and the liberal democratic order that underpins it is under severe stress around the globe (Galston 2018; Ikenberry 2018; Wakefield 2020). What will replace these married ideologies and their institutional scaffolding is unclear, but activists on the right see the collapse and are responding to it by engaging in “worldbuilding”, which we define as a series of projects to re-make, often first by breaking, societal structures, landscapes, urban environments, and even the construction of knowledge itself. The papers in this Symposium speak to just some of these varied projects.

One contemporary and relevant iteration[1] of this concept can be found in gaming—a space in which the far-right plays an increasingly active role (Schlegel and Kowert 2024). In video games, worldbuilding often begins with game designers, who create the game’s setting—the physical geography of the game—and its culture—the “languages, traditions, political systems, and historical events” that govern it (BIMM University 2024). The worldbuilding continues as players interact with each other inside the game.

Using this iteration of worldbuilding to understand the far-right in the real world is apropos given that its leaders use gaming to recruit new adherents. Their efforts often begin by normalizing hate inside games. This isn’t difficult to do given that many games already have deeply unequal worlds (Wells et al. 2024) and stereotypical non-white characters (Aguilera 2023; King and Leonard 2016). Some game narratives also allow players to act out racist, misogynistic, and anti-immigrant storylines (Vaux et al. 2021), such as playing the role of a Nazi or engaging in genocidal campaigns (Salvati 2020). And, as potential recruits are softened up, far-right gamers are able to harness them to harass the far-right’s enemies outside the game. “Gamergate” (Massanari 2017) is the quintessential example of a far-right-led harassment campaign, but harassment continues apace and spills out beyond the digital worlds of gaming. On internet forums and social media, the “gamer” identity now has been solidly tied to right and far-right messaging and sensibilities, with Elon Musk even calling to “Make Video Games Great Again!”[2]

It’s also important to unpack far-right worldbuilding because it directly challenges the concept and practice of worlding used by critical geographers (see Müller 2021; Roy and Ong 2011). Worlding is an analytic device for unpacking privileged epistemologies in knowledge production and opening up spaces for alternative visions of society that exist on the margins (Roy and Ong 2011). These are the very spaces that the far-right wants to undermine if not completely destroy. And, unfortunately, their worldbuilding project is at the moment more advanced and technologically adept than the left’s. As the Antipode Editorial Collective argued in 2020:

…at this historical moment, the Left continues to grapple with the challenge of bringing increasingly diverse social struggles into alignment, let alone tenuous forms of solidarity, often floundering. The Right, on the other hand, seems to be generating relatively coherent, transnational, and even counter-radical projects. (Antipode Editorial Collective 2020:4)

There are a variety of explanations for the left’s relative weakness, but a core tension surfaces between those who see identity politics as harming the left and those who view it as central to leftist struggle (for first-hand accounts of these positions, see Michaels et al. 2016; Reed 2014). It is not our intention to mediate these debates here, but rather to map what they mean for the political playing field and those who are forced to navigate it. Put simply, while the left is a contested terrain, marked by centripetal forces, the right is coalescing, driven by centrifugal forces. An understanding of these far-right forces and how they break and build worlds is necessary to effectively counter them. Indeed, we see understanding in this context as a component of antifascist work.

On the right—our focus here—the term “dissident right” proves a potent example of these forces. It has quickly become a discursive center of gravity, as different parts of the right grapple with the collapse of neoliberalism and the liberal democratic order. To be sure, the dissident right as a defining narrative may well collapse under the weight of its contradictions, of which there are many. Pogue (2023) describes the term as “a world of thought where categories get scrambled” and a place where “preppers, techies, hippies, farmers, naturalists, health bros, and hard-core dissident-right types—many of whom are unapologetically racist—mingle, argue, and plan with each other”. To be sure, there are members of the now-old right[3] gearing for battle against these dissidents, but for now, the far-right’s decision to pitch a big tent for ideas and for people (many of whom have never even shared space before), makes it a power to be reckoned with. And there is no better or more urgent time to think through these issues than at inflection points, such as elections, wars, and social upheavals.

Definitional Matters

As the comments above suggest, the terms left and right are particularly unstable at the moment. As a consequence, our ability to use them as analytic categories can be reasonably called into question. Given our focus on the far-right in this Symposium, we begin buy providing a brief, episodic overview of how these terms were constructed in the mid-20^th century and how they have changed over time. In so doing, we illustrate three things about the current left/right dichotomy. The classic configurations of economic and foreign policy approaches that have defined this dichotomy are dissolving. Identity has become more salient on both sides, albeit in different ways. While the left has embraced strategic essentialism, however temporarily, to ensure that marginal identities and their specific needs are not erased or defined by dominant identities (Eide 2016), the right has embraced identity politics for chauvinistic ends, reasserting dominant identities and equating their needs with the larger body politic. In this context, the left is fragmented while the right is coalescing (Gallaher 2019).

The traditional definition of the left/right dichotomy is tied to post-WWII debates[4] about the “proper” role of the state in managing capitalist industrialized economies and distributing the gains thereof. The left believed the state should take an active role in managing capital accumulation and guiding its redistribution. In so doing, it hoped to prevent uneven development across regions and sectors of the economy. The right, by contrast, embraced removing obstacles to capital accumulation (Bobbio 1996). Rightists argued that greater efficiency meant greater profits for society as a whole, and if those gains were distributed unevenly, it was still beneficial because capital would naturally flow to those best suited to reinvest it. This baseline definition lurks beneath discussions about the left and right today, even though it no longer accurately captures the dichotomy. Indeed, social issues are now as important as economic ones in providing the major contours of the left/right dichotomy, even those seismic changes to economic organization, from financialization to AI, are occurring under foot.

This definition first began to erode in the late 1960s with the rise of social movements focused on gender, sexuality, race, and the environment. Identity politics were not part of the original understanding of left and right, but they were married over time to the left side of the political spectrum (albeit uneasily). This alignment soon sparked a backlash from the right. In the US, for example, the push against Keynesianism, and its attendant “welfare state” policies, was more than an assault of the New Deal economic order. It was also posed as a moral corrective to the so-called “nanny state”, that had presumably lulled marginal groups into complacency with welfare and other entitlements. The intended if unspoken side-effect was to reimpose a social and economic hierarchy in which white men were at the top.

The end of the Cold War, and the global rise of neoliberalism, further upended a core distinction of the traditional definitions of left and right—mostly notably, the alliance of labor with the left, and “big business” with the right. In the US, for example, Democrats and Republicans both embraced the Washington Consensus model, which emphasized free trade over protections for domestic manufacturing at home and abroad (Harvey 2007; Williamson 1990). While labor did not immediately abandon the Democratic Party, over time its support has waned. And with the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, labor’s shift to the right has consolidated around a revanchist, anti-immigrant form of economic populism.

In Latin America, the Washington Consensus model was adopted under duress during the 1980s debt crisis, but the technocrats who put these structural adjustment programs (SAPs) into place ultimately championed them. In Mexico, for example, the adoption of multiple SAPs contributed to the decline of corporatism, a process that connected labor and peasant organizations to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the nominally left-wing party of the revolution (Correa-Cabrera and Ragland 2016). In the aftermath, the left fragmented. New parties to the left of the PRI formed, and one of the party’s key constituencies—peasants—initiated a short-lived guerilla war against the state. Though the guerilla army, Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), was the darling of the Latin American left, the guerilla-cum-social movement ultimately adopted a position of autonomy and distanced itself from the political system as a whole (Inclán 2020). In the aftermath, the right wing Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) grew, winning two presidential elections in a row.

The end of the Cold War and the subsequent embrace of neoliberalism in the EU’s eastward expansion also forced a reconfiguration of left and right parties across Europe. Crises sparked by neoliberalism over the last two decades—most notably the Greek financial crisis and the EU’s harsh disciplinary response to it—have overlapped with and exacerbated responses by the EU and its member states to mass migration, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia–Ukraine War, and NATO pressures. The concomitant but uneven shift in party structures throughout the EU hinges on the rise of far-right parties that have discursively equated class-based concerns and geo-cultural grievances, often focused on immigration and perceived loss of national culture and sovereignty. While national context still matters in how different far-right parties within the EU approach electoral gains, the European far-right writ-large has expanded its discursive space and its efforts to recruit and mobilize new members. Indeed, Golder (2016:482) identifies a “far right party family” that has converged ideologically around three themes—“radicalism, populism, and nationalism”. Some far-right parties have also quietly sanctioned violent actors outside of, but adjacent to, party structures. At the same time, fractiousness across European leftist parties—on how best to respond to neoliberal crises while continuing to defend progressive social priorities—has weakened their ability to aggressively counter the far-right. Even in the EU’s economic core in Germany, traditional left-leaning parties like the Social Democratic Party (or SPD)—Germany’s oldest political party, founded in 1875–have seen their electoral support eroding in the past few decades (for a detailed overview, see Balhorn 2023). New factions in Eastern Germany—for example around Sahra Wagenknecht, a charismatic leader who is economically left but socially conservative and has been flirting with Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) rhetoric on nationalism. The founding and subsequent participation of her party Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht in elections basically meant an end for the left party in several state parliaments, especially in the East, where many people voted for the new party. And even in countries where leftist parties have sought to overcome sectarian and political differences to counter the far right, as with the Nouvelle Front Populaire in France’s 2024 national elections, overcoming alliances between the center-right and far-right have proven difficult to hold and sustain (Fressoz 2024).

The fallout from 9/11, especially the war in Iraq, also divided left and right. In the UK, for example, former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq divided his Labour Party and helped give rise to 14 years of Tory rule. Once Tory rule commenced, similar internal divisions emerged, as Euroskeptics within the party began mimicking far-right parties in Germany (AfD) and beyond. Tory Euroskeptics ultimately pushed their Tory peers to support the Brexit referendum, even though it ran counter to the party’s free-trade orthodoxy.

In the US, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had a greater impact on the right, with so called paleoconservatives launching a successful attack against the dominant role of neoconservatives in the party. Indeed, part of Donald Trump’s appeal in his 2016 presidential campaign was his repudiation of Republican warmongering, even though he had supported the war when it began, and did little to end the American military presence in Afghanistan and the Middle East during his administration (Borger 2023).

Other external shocks have also muddled the lines between left and right. The Syrian War, and the millions of migrants who fled to Europe, refocused the left and the right on the issue of immigration, prompting debates about what it meant to be British, German, French, or Italian. In the UK, the far-right used migration to stir up support for Brexit, arguing that remaining in the EU would effectively leave the country at the mercy of EU quotas on migration. The far-right groups behind the “leave” campaign ultimately had a radical flank effect on Brexit discussions, pulling “remainers” and more moderate “leavers” to the right, with all of its attendant fear mongering about Muslims and immigrants intact (Oliver 2020).

It’s also worth noting that these dislocating politics were super-charged by the COVID-19 pandemic. As Naomi Klein (2023) notes in her book Doppelganger, the pandemic further muddled divisions along the political spectrum as conspiracy theories began to seep into mainstream right and left discourse. Indeed, the doppelganger at the center of her book is Naomi Wolf, whose leftist politics slowly but steadily morphed into a toxic brew of conspiracies and proto-fascist thinking (Marcotte 2024).

This cursory review helps explain why we can no longer assume that either left and right map neatly onto specific constellations of economic and foreign policy stances we typically associate with them. The 1970s era “New Right” in the US provides a case in point. When it formed, the New Right brought together an unlikely coalition of evangelicals, neoconservatives, and chamber of commerce business interests in support of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 bid for the presidency. For the next 40 years, this coalition supported laissez faire economics, muscular and interventionist foreign policy, and social conservatism (Diamond 1995). Today’s Republican Party only contains one of these constituencies (evangelicals); though it remains socially conservative, it is suspicious of foreign entanglements and often supports protectionist policies for favoured industries (Gallaher 2019). Cooper (2022) suggests, for example, that Trump favours private, dynastic businesses (like his own) over publicly traded businesses with shareholders, a perspective that directly appeals as well to the new robber barons of Silicon Valley.

Without consensus on what kind of capitalism or foreign policy is “right”, identity has taken hold as a key marker in the left/right divide. Indeed, the politics of white, Christian grievance against the “leftist” identities is ascendent in countries across the “West”, including the US, Hungary, France, etc. These identities include a collection of often disparate groups and political positions, including historically marginalized communities, immigrants, LGBTQI folks, feminists, environmentalists, and white people who support them. The term “woke” has become a transatlantic shorthand on the far-right to describe this constellation of groups and politics. Indeed, though the term emerged in the US within the Black community to indicate pride in its progressive politics, it has been colonized and “abnormalized” (Cammaerts 2022) by the right to suggest a deviant left (on Le Wokisme in France, see Williams 2023).

Analytic Coherence

Given the shifting ground underneath the left/right dichotomy, it is important to explain how a broad term like far-right can still serve as a useful and consistent thematic category of analysis. Far-right movements share similar understandings of the social while still debating economic organization, and the political structures that would govern it.

• The Social in Far-Right Thinking

Four guiding principles shape far-right ideologies as far as the social is concerned. First, far-right movements support rigid social hierarchies. Many also believe that social hierarchies are natural, even ordained by God (or gods). In India, for example, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindutva politics defines Islam as a subordinate religion that needs “taming” (Waikar 2018). While Modi’s economic policies have sought to make India open to global capitalist investment and embraced some standard elements of neoliberal orthodoxy, the social policies undergirding Hindu nationalism have forged links between the far-right in India and elsewhere.

Second, and relatedly, the far-right typically views inequalities across the social sphere as natural rather than the result of structural forces that advantage some groups over others. Attacks against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the US, for example, are premised on the notion that inequities are natural and as such attempts to undo them are not leveling playing fields, as DEI supporters argue, but instead building in advantages to those who do not deserve them.

Third, far-right groups and individual activists are deeply suspicious of liberal democracy because it is seen as undermining the “custom and religion” of native-born populations, encouraging cultural erosion and demographic replacement. That this argument is made even in nations continuously shaped by immigration indicates that what constitutes custom and religion are not static cultural practices so much as discourses.

Finally, conspiracist thinking frames the way that the social is approached across the right, even if the conspiracies vary. Most far-right conspiracy theories follow a few key tropes. One is that there are shadowy forces—often named as Jewish—who are influencing or even directing elected officials. Conspiracy theories like the “Zionist Occupied Government”, or ZOG for short, hold that Jews have taken over the US government directly—by getting elected or appointed to top government positions—or indirectly—by “buying off” politicians or threatening/extorting them (Berlet 2004). Another trope is that sitting governments are not legitimate and their laws can be ignored. In Germany, for example, Reichsbürger conspiracy theory holds that the current German government is a “tool of the Allied occupation”, which adherents believe is still in place (Staiano-Daniels 2022). Sovereign citizens in Canada similarly argue that the Canadian government does not exist and that Canada is actually governed by Queen Romana Didulo (Sarteschi 2023). Sarteschi (2023) notes that Didulo’s followers stop paying their bills, ignore court orders, and often pay devastating consequences including losing their homes and custody of their children. Increasingly, QAnon, a phenomenon that started in the US but has since gone global, acts as a clearinghouse for and an interpolator of conspiracies like these across the globe (Fox and Gallaher 2021).

The Importance of Worldbuilding and Worldbreaking

The papers collected in this Symposium look at different elements of right-wing worldbuilding. To be fair, they do this in disparate ways, and not necessarily in connection to worldbuilding or worlding debates. Indeed, this series of papers is the result of a call for papers on the far-right for the Denver AAG Annual Meeting in 2023. To secure broad interest, we left the call and theoretical scope open. Though this means the geographical scope of the contributions is limited in terms of their case studies, they nonetheless provide examples, each in their own way, of how to address far-right worldbreaking and worldbuilding. Some authors focus on narrative, examining how the far-right crafts notions of the future and how they revise history to legitimate violence. Others examine how the far-right conceives of the state in its current activism. Still others look at how the far-right is expanding its tent. And, because we are scholars, all of our papers look (to varying degrees) and debates about the best categories for analyzing far-right groups.

This is an important time to track the far-right’s worldbuilding efforts because they face less resistance against establishment orthodoxies that are widely seen, even by their supporters, as crumbling. Indeed, while there is a baseline agreement across the various iterations of the right that certain social hierarchies are correct, there is no formal agreement or consistent stance across them about the role of the state in the economy (laissez faire or protectionist?) or on foreign policy (isolationism, muscular interventionism, or selective alliance?). Put together, this is a flexible space where differences are being sorted out in real time, at the ground-game level where activists recruit, organize, and world-build one brick at a time. This brick-by-brick work is also likely to be supercharged (in the US and beyond) by the re-election of Donald Trump, who will use the bully pulpit of the American presidency to amplify far-right worldbuilding efforts.

This is where geography is so important. Geographers bring theories macro, meta, meso, and micro to their analyses of worldbuilding. These theories explain both how specific geographies and geographic imaginations are constructed (by communities, movements, and states) and how these place- and network-makers explain or obscure what went into this building. This information is important for those on the left who want to counter far-right hate today and reinforce the left’s ability to withstand its attacks going forward. Geographers have, for example, used theories of settler colonialism to unpack how American mythologies have been used to erase Native peoples’ histories in tourist spaces (Walter 2021) and legitimate militia claims to federal land in the US Intermountain West (Gallaher 2016; Walker 2018). Geographers have also pushed scholars of populism to spatialize their analyses. Using the concept of populist ecologies, for example, geographers have unpacked populism’s competing spatial narratives—most notably the competing views of the rural as a romantic place and an object of absolute territorial sovereignty (Menga 2022). They have also showed how these narratives inform politics in places as diverse as Hungary (Bori and Gonda 2022) and the Philippines (Saguin 2022), and how they construct competing social, political, economic, and ecological visions of “the people” and populist authenticity (Bosworth 2022). Still other geographers are pushing the discipline to expand how we understand the geopolitics of the right. Lizotte (2022) argues, for example, that while neoconservatism was crucial to framing the early 2000s War on Terror, evangelical and isolationist voices have become dominant, and this has implications for how America’s traditional enemies, especially Russia, are seen. Geographers have also used the concept of spatial fix to understand the way far-right actors use everyday spaces to connect urban, peri-urban, and rural spaces (Luger 2022).

The pieces here extend on this work thematically and geographically. And, we hope, it is a call for further work by ourselves and others.

Our Contributors

Autor*innenkollektiv Terra-R explores the territorialization of the far-right by comparing different conceptualizations of territory—the Latin American territorio and the Anglo-American territory. While the first foregrounds a bottom-up approach, the second examines the spatial abstractions that form territorialization. Their analysis demonstrates that both concepts operate effectively at different scales and could be fruitfully combined given the expanding nature of the right.

Stephan Hochleithner’s contribution examines the ambivalent position of the state in right-wing populist rhetoric and movements, especially as the relationship between “the people”, “the elite”, and the state is mediated through infrastructure. Different strands of right-wing populism engage in worldbuilding, he argues, by mobilizing resentment and channeling it through the state’s ability to provide social and physical infrastructure that meets the perceived and real needs of “the people”, itself a slippery and contested category. Approaching infrastructure as a component of everyday life and using examples from the US, the UK, and Austria, Hochleithner demonstrates how far-right movements and parties have read the state’s geographically and socially uneven accessibility through infrastructure.

The reading of everyday urban space is likewise the focus on Daniel Kubiak’s piece, which investigates the public memory and scripting of far-right violence against immigrants in Magdeburg, Germany. The spatialization of far-right organizing and violence in Germany is tied strongly to the stigmatization of the former German Democratic Republic (DDR) in post-reunification Germany, and has become a form of Othering in the national political landscape and geographical imagination. Kubiak argues that overcoming such simplistic spatial categories must be accompanied by a reimagining of urban space in historical and social context, confronting far-right violence and presence as part of the city’s post-reunification history, but not its entirety.

Carolyn Gallaher looks at a different national and political context, specifically how the term “militia” is used in the US today. She argues that American exceptionalism underpins the use of this term. Indeed, in the US, the term militia has a romantic association with the American Revolution. Gallaher argues that in using this term instead of labels used elsewhere to define non-state armed groups—such as guerillas, rebels, paramilitaries, etc.—we are not only providing militias with a patina of legitimacy they do not deserve, but also legitimizing their whitewashed notions of history.

Carl Dahlman and Gallaher explore the synergies that are developing between far-right movements and alternative religious movements, such as new age belief systems. Using January 6^th as a threshold event, they argue that these synergies force us to look beyond institutionalist approaches to understanding authoritarianism. They also argue that the blending of ideological and cultural elements we see here have a “geopolitical mood” that bears watching.

Chris Lizotte and Jason Luger discuss how far-right conspiracist gatherings are increasingly entering nominally ordinary spaces of democratic life, for example, debates around urban planning initiatives like traffic-calming and low-emissions policies in UK, European, and North American cities. Utilizing the notion of the far-right “cloud” (following Milan 2015), they suggest that widespread epistemic mistrust, i.e. skepticism of perceived elites, policy experts, and governments, provides an opening for far-right movements to fill otherwise apolitical or post-political arenas. The technocratic and ordinarily banal world of urban planning becoming a ripe terrain for protest, polarizing debate and as an anchor for diffuse conspiracist movements to cohere, is thereby demonstrative.

Intervention Symposium—“Worldbuilding and Worldbreaking: New Spatialities of the Far-Right”

Introduction by Jamey Essex, Carolyn Gallaher and Jason Luger

For a Non-Exceptionalist Spatial Theory of Far-Right Mobilizations by Autor*innenkollektiv Terra-R

Infrastructure and Resentment: Re-/Considering the Role of Narratives of “The State” in Right-Wing Populist Success by Stephan Hochleithner

“Far-right, that’s the others”: Remembrance of Far-Right and Racist Violence in an East German City by Daniel Kubiak

What’s in a Name? American Exceptionalism and US Militias by Carolyn Gallaher

Of Chakras and Shock Troops: Insurrectionary Affinities to Alternative Religious Movements by Carl T. Dahlman and Carolyn Gallaher

Conspiracists at Rush Hour: The Extraordinary Nature of the Far-Right’s Algorithmic Creep into Ordinary Democratic Spaces by Chris Lizotte and Jason Luger

Endnotes

[1] Worldbuilding as a concept has a long history. It has been used by Heidegger, Marx, Hardt and Negri, and Spivak, among others (for more detailed discussions of these prior uses, see Müller 2021; Roy and Ong 2011).

[2] See https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1847049775922782221 (last accessed 3 December 2024).

[3] Here we speak of the 1970s era US New Right, which was a broad coalition of chamber of commerce business interests, neo-conservatives embracing muscular foreign policy, and evangelicals who came together to support Ronald Reagan’s presidential candidacy in the 1980 presidential election (Diamond 1995). This coalition would serve as the backbone of the Republican Party for nearly 40 years (up until the 2016 presidential election, which Donald Trump won).

[4] These debates began in the 1930s in response to state efforts to address the Great Depression, but they were largely set aside until the end of World War II.

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Featured image: Symbolic deterritorializations—Examples of partially destroyed Antifa and Fridays-for-Future stickers in Berlin and Leipzig, Germany (source: Terra-R, 2020 and 2023)