@hajogu.bsky.social und @chjncke.bsky.social erstellen einen konzeptionellen Rahmen und eine Methotik zur Untersuchung der extremen Rechten in der Zivilgesellschaft und wenden dies in einer Fallstudie an:
doi.org/10.1162/EUSO...

We provide a brief overview of the state of the art on the contributions of organized civil society and social movements to democracy - but we also address 'uncivil' society and authoritarian movements. In the spirit of the encyclopedia, we specifically point to international perspectives.

Civil society and democracy are often closely associated - yet their relationship complex and ambiguous. In this contribution, we ask: under what conditions does civil society support democracy—and when does it undermine it?

Wir arbeiten daran. Veröffentlichung kommt (hoffentlich) bald!
www.wzb.eu/de/forschung...

Link to the paper:
direct.mit.edu/euso/article...

This does not mean that the far right does not posses a threat. But cooperative actions such as donation offers or challenges from within civil society require different counter-strategies than attacks from outside.

Our findings challenge the notion of a dichotomy between a democratic civil society and the far right as an outside force that attacks CSOs or their members.

What does this mean? We need to combine different lenses to get a comprehensive picture of the far right in civil society that goes beyond protest and violence.

Finding (4): The picture of far-right contention in civil society depends on the lens through which one looks. While the media-observer lens sees primarily adversarial actions, the antagonist-observer lens sees mostly autonomous actions, while the target lens perceives more cooperative events.

Finding (3): Our analysis shows that far-right contention primarily targets the field level rather than individual volunteers or CSOs.

Finding (2): The far right is often perceived as a challenge that is external to civil society,
emanating from actors whose ideology is clearly nativist and authoritarian. However, our analyses show that many actors come from within civil society and cannot be identified as ideologically far-right.

Finding (1): The far-right repertoire of contention in civil society goes beyond adversarial forms
such as threats or violence. We find a substantial number of cooperative and autonomous forms of action.

We use quantitative and qualitative coding of these sources to map far-right contentious events within German civil societ from 2018-2023. We code the action repertoires, actors, and targets of far-right contention.

We propose to combine three lenses to map far-right contention in civil society: The media-observer lens, the antagonist observer lens, and the target lens. We employ a newspaper (taz), antifa magazines, and qualitative interviews as sources for these lenses.

In this paper, we propose the concept of "far-right contention in civil society" to capture how the far right engages with volunteers, civic organizations, and entire civil society fields. We look at contentious events a) by far-right actors and/or b) which involve nativist or authoritarian claims.