The International Turn in Far-Right Studies: A Critical Assessment

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an intense public debate regarding the worldwide re-emergence of far-right politics and the ways in which it has engaged with the international. Surprisingly, thus far there have been no reflections on the broader implications of conceptualising the far-right in its international, transnational, and global dimensions. This article argues that we are witnessing an international turn in far-right studies that posits the international as constitutive of far-right politics, opening new forms of understanding it both from a historical and theoretical point of view. It develops a conceptual assessment of the international turn in three steps: first, it identifies that what binds this interdisciplinary literature together and breaks away from mainstream approaches is a shared critique of methodological nationalism; second, it classifies innovations in two different conceptual levels: the ‘globalisation front’, which sees transformations in the nature of far-right politics due the intensification of globalisation, and the ‘historiographical front’, which claims that the far-right has always been an international phenomenon. The article then analyses the main limitations of the international turn and offers a way to overcome it by articulating an intersocietal approach to the study of the far-right that draws from Global Historical Sociology.