Imagining Far-right Terrorism explores far-right terrorism as an object of the narrative imagination in contemporary Western Europe.
Western European societies are generally reluctant to think of far-right violence as terrorism, but the reasons for this remain little understood. This book focuses on the extraordinarily complex case of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) in Germany, and high-profile instances of racist violence in Sweden and Norway. The author analyses the narratives surrounding far-right violence, drawing on a broad range of empirical sources. Her account attributes the limits of imagining violence as far-right terrorism to elite practices of narrative control that maintain positive images of the liberal-democratic order in counterpoint to its two constitutive 'others' - the far-right and racialised minorities. Situated broadly within the scholarly tradition of critical terrorism studies, the book breaks new ground in research on far-right terrorism by following its narrative traces across time, public spaces of contestation, and national borders. It also draws on material and findings on far-right terrorism originally written in German, Swedish, and Norwegian, which were previously not available in English.
This much-needed volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers of terrorism and political violence, right-wing extremism, European politics, and communication studies.