Collective Action Frames in the Finnish Terrorgram – Analyzing Militant Far-Right Accelerationism

According to the Finnish security authorities, lone individuals and small groups pose the most significant threat of far-right terrorism in Finland, while organized far-right movements do not currently pose such a threat. Recent cases of far-right terrorist crimes have been arguably proved this assessment to be correct. However, the isolation of the so-called lone wolves or even small groups is at best relative. Especially the frames and narratives used by the terrorist actors are often shared by their peers within the radical milieu, and by the organized groups. In this paper, we analyze the collective action frames employed by a Finnish far-right group convicted for terrorist crimes in 2023 by studying their Telegram chat group messages. Understanding their violent activities as relational, we explore also the radical milieu they were a part of. For this purpose, we compare their framing efforts to the narratives presented by the Blue-Black Movement, a fascist political party some of the group members also previously belonged to, exploring commonalities and differences between them. We have chosen to use epistemologically relatively different and distant types of data, one extracted from a public webpage of a legal political party, another from a Telegram group including potentially illegal messaging and action calls, to emphasize the actual closeness of the two studied groups. After identifying key framing tasks, diagnostic, prognostic and motivational in the data, we continue studying more specifically the ways they rationalize their violent actions (or the lack of such action), and how boundary framing is used when constructing the enemy images. To explore the framing mechanisms in more detail, and tease out the differences between studied groups, we will employ more detailed, linguistic frame analysis based on the framework by Fairhurst (2011). Considering framing deals with the different levels of justifications, action calls and mobilization, our work also illuminates whether we are dealing with tactical or ideological radicalisation. Fairhurst, G., T. (2011). The Power of Framing Creating the Language of Leadership. Jossey-Bass, A wiley imprint. San Francisco. ISBN: 9780470901328.