Unravelling the “Right” Turn to Violence: A Relational Perspective on Golden Dawn’s Radicalisation Process (1980–2013)

The recent resurgence of right-wing extremism across Europe has sparked a renewed interest in understanding the drivers behind this worrying trend. Then again, academic research has primarily focused on political parties and electoral behaviour. In fact, there is limited literature exploring the non-institutional side of far-right politics, including how political parties interact with grassroots movements and the wider far-right milieu. The same is true for Golden Dawn (GD) —a Greek neo-Nazi group, considered one of the most extreme organisations in Europe — as scholarly attention has mostly centred on GD’s electoral success during the economic crisis in Greece (2010-2018) rather than on its violence, which has been recognised as merely a by-product of the group’s extreme ideology. However, previous research on political violence has demonstrated that a group’s ideology is a facilitative, but insufficient condition for the emergence of violence. Besides, an approach that understands GD’s violence as an exclusive effect of its ideology tells only one side of the story, as it fails to account for a) the absence of systematic violence during the group’s formative years (1980-1990) and b) for the escalation of violence after the party’s success in the 2012 general elections (6,9%), which challenges the popular belief that extreme right organisations tend to utilise “internal brakes” to appear as legitimate political parties and fare better in ballots. Consequently, there is a gap in the literature on the causes that triggered GD’s violence, or in other words on the dynamics of the group’s radicalisation process. This study aims to identify the conditions that gave rise to GD’s violence and explain its variation over time based on a process tracing approach that delineates the causal mechanisms that drove the group’s radicalisation process throughout its four-decade-long history.