Description
Recent high-profile attacks have drawn public attention to the threat of right-wing terrorism. This has led to an increased scholarly and policy attentiveness to the dangers posed by this form of political violence. Within the discipline of terrorism studies, right-wing terror is being discussed as a potential ‘5th wave’, following Rapoport’s analysis of the 4 waves of modern terrorism.
Yet, as this article argues, it is not possible for terrorism studies to merely integrate the far-right as another case study. Indeed, the challenge for the discipline is that the current moment reveals an uncomfortable and troubling silence concerning the importance of right-wing terror, and its absence from the historiographies of contemporary terrorism.
Developing under-utilised empirical cases of right-wing terror, this article argues that first, there is a pressing need to reconceptualise the histories we tell of contemporary terrorism, beyond a focus only on stories of clandestine, ‘rebel’ organisations. And second, that attentiveness to right-wing terrorism throughout modernity challenges the conceptual boundaries of the discipline itself, drawing attention to significant differences between disciplinary accounts of terrorism and that often found with right-wing terror, notably concerning organisation, preferred target and, crucially, their relationship to the state.
