Guest Editors’ introduction

The rise of the far-right has recently legitimised its politics whilst strengthening systemic racism (Mondon and Winter 2020), as well as social exclusion. Moreno-Almeida and Gerbaudo (2021, 885) recently identified a renewed stream of far-right discourses as racist and anti-immigration, anti-semitic and Islamophobic, anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-leftist, anti-establishment and reactionary and ethno-and ultranationalist. In recent years, bourgeoning literature studying a rather unleashed far-right online extremism, has examined how far-right publics make their audiences thanks to what social media platforms avail to them (see Baele, Brace, and Coan 2023; Holt, Freilich, and Chermak 2022; Munn 2019; Wahlström, Törnberg, and Ekbrand 2021). This is namely a rampant circulation of their narratives without fact-checking and perennial othering in an unscrupulous manner. Within the existing studies of the political communication of far-right groups and/or ordinary far-right users, the visual side of political mobilisation has been neglected until recently (see Doerr 2017). Visual symbols, posters and videos are crucial forms of the representation of far-right political mobilisation today as they provide rich materials for content creators to reach their onlookers – even if ghoulish at times – and make new audiences by exploiting accessible, ubiquitous, and immediate features of visual communication (Doerr, Mattoni, and Teune 2015). Following Aiello and Parry (2019), our aim in this special section is to study the ways renewed far-right ideas and identities are casted, shaped and maintained through visuals that enable performing the self, communicating a collective identity and/or foregrounding the difference of ‘others’ (e.g. refugees, Muslims, etc.).

The Special Section studies how professional far-right groups as well as ordinary extremist users exploit visual techniques and how such techniques facilitate their exploitation to perform overtly racist and white supremacist social and political identities, particularly in the aftermath of Europe’s so-called refugee crisis era. It aims to examine promotional and propagandist visual media objects, produced and/or circulated within the interconnected far-right, alt-right, white supremacist, anti-immigrant, anti-black and Islamophobic socio-cultural-political networks in this period by taking an intersectional approach on visual extremism. The following papers study mundane forms of far-right visual communication (e.g. memes and DIY videos on YouTube and TikTok videos).

As an extension of the rampant racist public sphere following the so-called refugee crisis, the special section primarily aims to understand how subcultural visual media contents have reached out to more mainstream audiences using image-based media platforms and to delineate discourse worlds and organisation patterns of do-it-yourself media, reflecting on the far-right’s claims of injustice, grievance, and alienation – themes central to studying radicalisation to the EU Horizon 2020 funded D.Rad: De-radicalisation in Europe and Beyond: Detect, Resolve, Reintegrate project. As such, the special section is an attempt at understanding the ways subcultural image-based content transpire from echo-chambers and reach more mainstream audiences through features and affordances inherent to social media platforms and visual media. The special section systematically analyses the social and political impact of the representation, distribution, and consumption of visual media objects that reveal a perceived sense of their users’ assumed victimisation and/or lack of agency.

The contributions to studies of far-right visual communication in this special section include but not limited to, first, delineating the dominant visual practices and strategies, production dynamics, discourses, distribution, and/or organisation patterns of visual media, produced by both professional and relatively amateur groups and individuals that have radicalised around their perception of immigration, refugees, and ethnic and racial minorities. Second, it studies how visually mediated forms of radicalisation operate online in contrasting political systems (e.g. liberal and authoritarian), using divergent types and platforms of visual media, as well as in under-represented territories in research over visual cultures and online extremism. From a review of state-led far-right extremism to everyday far-right visual communication, the special section focuses on various aspects that make up visual extremism. It enriches this study with a review of online images, legacy, and do-it-yourself media in order to present how both conspicuously and inconspicuously media can serve for the radicalisation of its spectators.

The first paper of the Special Section, co-authored by Hasret Bilgin Dikici, Umut Korkut and Roland Fazekas focused on anti-refugee visual communication in the post-refugee crisis period in Turkey and Hungary. In this period, both countries have acted arguably as the gatekeepers for the EU while they have differentiated in terms of their macro politics of refugee reception with the first one having a nominally open-doors policy towards the Syrians and the latter operating an exclusionary refugee regime. Looking at state-led radicalisation represented in social media platforms, this paper examines popular anti-refugee videos on YouTube and the dissemination of these videos in these two countries at Europe’s periphery. The article focuses on DIY anti-refugee videos that promoted a homogeneous and xenophobic identity for Hungary and Turkey in the period. An important finding of the paper is that DIY citizenship and visual activism could serve the means of authoritarianism, arguing that the visual representation of refugees as the absolute other to boost mainstream radicalisation in both countries.

In their paper, Ozge Ozduzen, Nelli Ferenczi and Isabel Holmes adopt an opposite approach to Hasret Dikici-Bilgin, Umut Korkut and Roland Fazekas' paper and show how far-right immigration and equality agendas of the mainstream political public sphere in the UK increasingly feed into the online ecosystems of white supremacy, racism and neo-colonialism in the aftermath of the so-called refugee crisis and Brexit. Rather than a legacy platform, this second paper focuses on mundane far-right visual communication on TikTok. The paper concentrates arguably on youth extremism and everyday far-right recruitment on TikTok, considering TikTok is currently a new global platform that is used primarily by adolescents and teenagers. The paper showed the ways image-based platforms such as TikTok enable users with an opportunity to create ‘snackable’ short videos, which provide ‘enjoyable’, ‘fun’ and tech-savvy alternatives to more serious media contents created by the government or far-right organisations and thus help the mainstreaming of far-right ideas in this period.

The final article concentrates on the more organised forms of far-right organisation online, using visual representation and dissemination techniques. Virpi Salojärvi, Emilia Palonen, Laura Horsmanheimo and Roosa-Maria Kylli examine the ways Finnish far-right articulates and performs affectively ‘us’ through counter-hegemonic articulations on YouTube. The paper embraces the Laclaudian theory of hegemony to understand affective appeals embedded in far-right videos that aspire to cultivate a new line of antagonism, which contests existing political forces and constructs new and wider collective subjects. The analysis ranges from the visual to the audio-visual dimension, which thereby enables an extension of an exploration of the formulation of diverse signifiers and affective interpretations. In concentrating on two different types of videos of organised far-right groups namely the right-wing populist party Finns Party’s 2019 election video and a further right Blue–Black Movement’s campaign video, the paper ultimately shows how YouTube videos offer affective mobilisation and (dis)identification for wider audiences and thus eventually mainstream far-right ideas and ideologies.

In conclusion, this Special Section brings in empirical, conceptual, and theoretical contributions to the study of visual studies. Empirically, it presents a review of visual media and radicalisation in a wide range of European countries from the centre to the periphery, from democratic to authoritarian. Conceptually, it offers a novel take on certain themes as ephemerality and permanence as well as snapshots versus legacies of visual identities. It also builds firm conceptual links between the source and its audience in view of their cross-fertilisation mediated by the social and political regimes in power. It re-elaborates on the roles of the latter considering how their mediation operates to radicalise the audience. While this Special Section primarily embraces cultural studies approach, it also embraces technological, economic, and political formations feeding visual cultures. Methodologically, qualitative visual analysis methods allowed the authors to identify patterns within the visuals made, posted and/or distributed in the far-right social networks, whilst recognising that visual styles and norms may evolve over time (Khazraee and Novak 2018). Today, global social media platforms increasingly take proactive measures to crack down on accounts promoting extremist views, especially text-based legacy platforms such as X/Twitter (Mahl, Zeng, and Schäfer 2021). Considering content moderation and exploitation, immediacy, and ephemerality particularly related to visual content informed by extremist opinions, ideas and ideologies, the Special Section also serves as an archival practice of Internet visual cultures (Crawford, Keen, and Suarez-Tangil 2021).

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).