Understanding Civil Society Organizations´ Response to Right-Wing Extremism: A Theoretical Framework and Empirical Study

This article expands on the understanding of how civil society respond to right-wing extremism. Drawing from central strands in the defending democracy literature, this article introduce a framework that helps us to untangle varieties of CSOs responses to right wing extremism. The framework is based on two dimensions, tolerance-intolerance and passive vs active political engagement and identifies four general types of responses. Using this framework as a point of departure, the article contribute empirically by analyzing how various types of locally based CSOs in the city of Ludvika in Sweden have responded to the leading neo-Nazi movement in the Nordic countries, the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) prior to the 2018 Swedish election.