The 'War on Terror' has been the longest ongoing conflict that the US has been involved in and shows no sign of ending in the near future. The threat of terrorism is something that the US government has continually warned the populace about prior to the start of the 'war on terror.' The the fear that the US places on terrorism focuses on Islamic extremism in particular and can be considered to be unjust. This leads to the understanding that the US takes part in Islamophobia because of its continuation of an unjust fear towards Islam. Islamophobia is an idea that has primarily been associated with individuals instead of the state or media. This thesis utilizes the work of Khaled Beydoun to show how the US has kept the idea of Islamophobia away from the state's sphere of responsibility while also creating policy that takes part in Islamophobia. Beydoun provides this thesis with new definitions for Islamophobia that allow for new conclusions to be made when the state is considered. This is combined with an understanding of how the media covers events and protects the state from the ideas of Islamophobia. The understanding of violence, as shown by Asad, created within the state influences this thesis greatly because of its connection to how the state reacts to attacks. The state has historically targeted minority groups as an "other" that can be targeted with policy and seen as a threat to the populace. This has allowed far-right groups who target minority groups to grow without being targeted by the state, these groups are allowed to continue their violence because it aligns with the states goals. This thesis looks to combine these ideas with case studies of different attacks in order to show how the US utilizes Islamophobia in counterterrorism policy. / Master of Arts / The United States has been involved in the 'war on terror' since the attacks of September 11, 2001. This has led the US to creating policy that has been meant to protect the populace from another attack of this caliber from happening. The policies that have been created have focused on targeting the threat of Islamic extremist violence. This thesis looks to show how the US has unfairly targeted Muslim populations with the policy that it has created, while other threats have grown without being addressed. First, it will be shown how Islamophobia is not something that can only be committed by an individual, as commonly believed. This thesis will utilize new definitions of islamophobia to highlight how the state can take part in islamophobia and how Islamophobia is kept from being associated with the state. This will be combined with a discussion of three different cases, as well as a discussion of how the US creates policies. The US historically created policy based upon the enemy that it had identified at the time, the current case being Islamic extremism. This targeting has generally been focused on minority groups while larger far-right groups have gone about without being targeted. Far-right groups grew in this time period because the state did not label them as a threat and they carried out violence against the targets identified by the state. This thesis will show how the state has allowed far-right violence to grow within the state and allowed it to become a part of the violence within the state while targeting minority groups that have smaller followings and pose less of a direct threat. It will look to show how the state has enabled this growth while continually focusing policy in another direction. Combining these ideas with the cases that are studied allow this thesis to answer, "how does the US utilize Islamophobia in counterterrorism policy?"

Immigration and its impact on aggregate welfare state preferences and welfare state reform has been the subject of numerous academic and political debates. Despite prolonged attention to these issues, however, empirical research has yielded mixed results concerning what effect, if any, immigration has the structure and generosity of the welfare state. This issue is further exacerbated by the absence of concerted conceptual cross-germination between the various theoretical literatures that examine immigration's effect on various social, economic, and political outcomes, making it difficult to identify the mechanisms through which immigration may shape the welfare state. To address these issues, I draw on social psychological research, theories of the welfare state, research on radical right-wing parties, and case studies from the United States to argue that changes in both the volume and characteristics of immigrants entering Western Europe might: 1) undermine the cross-class alliances necessary for maintaining the welfare state, 2) reduce public support for welfare programs, and 3) provide politicians on the far-right with a symbolic resource that can be used to justify cutting/restructuring welfare state programs believed to benefit immigrants. Empirical examinations of these arguments using a wide range of data sources indicate that immigration may be directly and indirectly related to welfare state spending. With regard to the former, the data indicate that the influx of migrants from less-developed countries into social and Christian democratic countries has contributed to rising program demand and corresponding increases in expenditures on more reactive welfare state programs (i.e., unemployment benefits). With regard to the indirect impact of immigration on the welfare state, analyses of voting and public opinion data demonstrate that changes in immigration have contributed to the electoral success of predominantly neoliberal, far-right, nationalist parties and contributed to rising levels of anti-immigrant sentiment over time. These factors, in turn, resulted in: 1) declines in popular support for those social and Christian democratic parties that are dedicated to the maintenance and/or expansion of the welfare state, and 2) reductions in average levels of support for welfare state programs designed to address issues of unemployment, making the welfare state more vulnerable to future retrenchment.

The 2016 election cycle has shown a dramatic radicalization of the right, featuring elements such as out-group demonization, law and order rhetoric, and populist strategies that have not been so prevalent in the US since the rise of Nixon’s Silent Majority in the 1970s. The UK has experienced a similar ideological shift, though its emergence has perhaps not been so notoriously outspoken. All the same, the fervent anti-statist and anti-elitist narrative employed by the Leave Campaign is starkly similar to language historically associated with the populist rhetoric of the Far Right. Drawing on analyses of economic, socio-cultural, and geopolitical trends that have changed the status quo of each of these countries in the post-crisis era, I attempt to elucidate potential factors that have made Far Right narratives of fear, paranoia, and insecurity particularly salient.

This thesis illuminates meaning(s) of religion in a Swedish radical nationalist context. The empirical study is based on a critical text analysis of author Jonas De Geer, key ideology producer of Swedish radical nationalism. The research questions concern how the publications of Jonas De Geer, during the period 1996-2016, address issues related to religion and Christian imagery. The primary aim of the thesis – to study how the concept of religion is understood, negotiated and used in a Swedish radical nationalist context – is enunciated through an examination of how identity and antagonists are construed through the notions of religion in the material, and how these concepts change over time. An applied text analysis, informed by critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, constitutes the methodological framework of the study. The empirical analysis suggests that Christianity and national identity are construed as intertwined and natural, while Judaism is portrayed as the primary antagonist. Additionally, Islam and modernist ideals are depicted as weapons used by Jewish influence to dominate the West. Drawing on these empirical implications, the study concludes that religion functions as a racist configuration in De Geer's symbolic universe.

The purpose of this study is to further examine the populist wave that has struck the West, with specific regards to France and Germany. The growing anti-immigrant sentiment, the discontent with “establishment” politics, and fear-mongering tactics has given rise to far-right political parties such as the National Front and the Alternative for Germany. These political parties prove threatening to the democratic institutions in place, for they wish to limit the liberties of those who seem too different. Through delving into the core values of these countries and specific events revolving around foreigners, I explain how xenophobic ideology has been allowed to permeate through France and Germany’s society and has increased the legitimacy of political leaders like Marine Le Pen and Frauke Petry.

This research touches the basics of a clothes-trading process. The process occurs as an outsideparty is being politically absorbed by a mainstream party which aim is to oust the smaller party from the electoral arena. The outside-party would ensure survival by dismiss its policy dimension, thus moving towards an opposite strategic direction away from the incoming mainstream party. The toolkit is taking from the PSO-theory by Bonnie M. Meguid (2008) in order to describe the clothes-trading process by each step as a party strategy. It is a defeat fire with fire type of conflict, with the end not yet discovered, but assumed to be a total exchange between the parties’ issue ownership. So far it is too early to predict the outcome. Further studies have to be made on the future elections in order to elaborate the clothes-trading process more in detail. But the research has set the basics of how and why such a process would occur.

This paper analyses three of the dominating discourses Anders Behring Breivik used in his compendium, the official title of which is 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence, also known as Breivik's Manifesto. It is believed Breivik posted his Manifesto on the Internet shortly before the attacks in Norway in July, 2011. The number 2083 stands for the year when the "Western European Civil War" was expected to be completed, all traitors executed, and all Muslims deported from Europe. This article will discuss dominating discourses in the Manifesto, seen from a background of a European multicultural backlash, in which the political far-right movement is increasing. Furthermore, this article will end with a discussion of education and the importance of analysis of such phenomena within different subjects.

British politics at the start of the 21st century provide a good setting for examining factors associated with mobilisation for extremist politics. This thesis is concerned with the relationship between individuals' preferences, their local setting and political behaviour. With focus on two outcomes - participation in urban rioting and support for a far right party - this thesis is divided into two parts and consists of five research papers addressing different aspects of mobilisation. In the first part we focus on urban disorder and examine police arrest records from the London riot of 2011. Much of the sociological literature has focused on variation in rioting across cities; here we examine variation within London by mapping the residential addresses of 1,620 rioters onto over 25,000 neighbourhoods. Our findings challenge the orthodoxy that rioting is not explained by deprivation or by disorganisation. Furthermore, we present evidence suggesting the importance of political grievances, in particular relations with the police, and examine the process of mobilisation to show that it was aided by spatial proximity and social similarity. In the second part we look at factors associated with engagement with far right politics. We use individual attitudinal data from the British Election Study to examine whether concerns over immigration are associated with the actual experience of immigration in one's place of residence. The results suggest that local setting does play some role, although individual factors seem to be more important. Secondly, we use leaked British National Party membership list to map 12,536 far right supporters onto over 200,000 neighbourhoods in Britain. Our findings underline the importance of a larger geographic context, where some spatial configurations present particularly fertile grounds for the far right; we also report the relative unimportance of cultural threat and significance of the social distance. Lastly, we question the recently advocated 'legacy effect' and suggest that white flight mechanism may possibly be an alternative way of thinking about organisational continuity.

The presented graduation thesis deals with radical right wing parties in the political system of the Czech republic. The far-right wing parties occured in the area of the present Czech republic in the second half of 19th century. In the following years their number and importance fluctuated. In the last twenty years the Dělnická strana appeared. This party was the most important far-right wing party since 1989 until present days. Dělnická strana was founded in 2002 and cancelled was by the Supreme Administrative Court eight years later. Many far-right wing parties acted in Czech republic besides this one after 1989. None of them, including Dělnická strana sociální spravedlnosti, which is the successor party of Dělnická strana, had ever achieved such popularity and elective results.

This paper analyzes the evolution of the Front national (FN), a French political party on the far right, from its initial breakthrough victory in 1984 all the way through to its unprecedented showing in France’s 2017 presidential election. The most obvious change it explores is that of leadership, seeking to determine in what ways the ‘original’ FN controlled by its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen (1972-2011) differs from the party’s ‘new’ incarnation under his daughter Marine Le Pen (2011-present). It begins by examining the makeup and motivations of the party’s electorate in the 1984 elections to the European Parliament, and by identifying the FN’s ideological predecessors more broadly. With a focus on the turning-point presidential elections of 2002, 2007, and 2012, the paper then follows the development of the party’s rhetoric, strategy, and supporters since the 1980s, as well as how it is perceived by the wider public. Throughout, attention is paid to unique factors that have impacted the FN’s trajectory, such as the gender difference between Jean-Marie and Marine, former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s courting of right-wing voters, and the influence of terrorism. It concludes by noting the hidden ‘victories’ that the FN has achieved, and with a warning never to underestimate the party, even when it seems to have suffered a loss.