Visions of division: the temporal structure of far-right narratives on the future

The proposed paper will analyse the temporal structure that is running through political narratives about the future in order to carve out their authoritarian characteristics. More specifically, it will examine the notions of decay and apocalypse that motivate extremist actors on the transnational far right across Western countries to overcome democratic institutions and engage in political violence. Expanding on literature that analyses these narratives as conspiracy theories, it shifts our analytical gaze to an aspect that can further our understanding of their link to the contestation of political orders - while acknowledging their rootedness in particular knowledge orders. Theoretically, it will rely on literature on social imaginaries (Taylor, 2004; Anderson, 1983; Appadurai, 2013; Jasanoff & Kim, 2015), but tie them more closely to conceptions of the future (Beckert, 2016) and sociology of time (Rosa, 2017). Besides embedding empirical findings on extremist movements in a wider sociological framework of late modern temporal structures, this angle allows us to investigate different national narratives – that can be understood as variations of the same theme – in conjunction as parts of a transnational imaginary. Empirically, it will engage with the transnationalised future imaginary of the far right in the West that is reflected in narratives such as the ‘grand remplacement’, the ‘Umvolkung’, or the ‘white genocide’. To this end, the paper will analyse several right-wing extremist manifestos that were published surrounding so-called ‘lone wolf’ attacks in several different Western countries with regards to their temporal structure.