A Querpolitics Approach to the Far Right? Notes from Germany and India
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: This essay relates the resurgence of contemporary far-rightFootnote1 politics to a distinctive querpolitics (a transverse or diagonal politics) of socially, politically, and ideologically heterogeneous assembly. This calls for a reconceptualization of the global far right beyond homogeneous understandings of ideological beliefs. Instead of ideologically aligned fellow travelers bound together by their common consent to a system of thick beliefs, far-right political formations are located within messy and fissured socio-political fields. They assemble a varied and contradictory collection of individual, transactional actors with divergent interests. Moreover, the far right is often embedded in mainstream circuits of political and social life that are distinct from and often even opposed to overtly extremist positions. I elaborate on these points through a discussion of far-right politics in Germany and India. If the former is notable as a historically significant case, the latter is where the world’s largest far-right political movement is presently located.
Source: Political Communication
Author: Srirupa Roy
Institution: University of Göttingen
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4403375562