Political action in reponse to the COVID-19 crisis generated hope for political action on a larger looming crisis, the climate crisis. Articulating climate change in terms of crisis and positioning it in the context of apocalypse can be an effective mobilizer of short-term action. Yet, alarmist discourse risk plunging people into apathy. In this article, we examine imaginaries of the climate crisis invoked by climate activist organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic, as they tried to influence the political agenda on Twitter (now X) and, not least, call for action on the climate crisis. We identify five key activist climate imaginaries and show how an apocalyptic imagery was invoked in response to the pandemic. However, this apocalyptic imaginary was rarely invoked on its own, but in relation to other key climate imaginaries. Our findings contribute to research on agenda setting and the role of political imaginaries in struggles over societal transformations, and especially the role of activist imaginaries when challenging dominant climate imaginaries in attempts to influence the political agenda and generate political action.

This comparative case study of the Freedom Movement in Sweden and the Freedom Convoy in Canada provides insights into the processes of transnationalization involved in the (re)production of far-right narratives around the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the online media of these protest movements we explore the extent to which the political and cultural context shaped far-right meta narratives and more universal concerns around the pandemic. The study finds significant similarities in how protest narratives in the two countries were constructed and appropriated to intersect with far-right extremism and anti-establishment ideas but also that these narratives were repurposed to make sense in two national contexts characterized by stark differences in the level of restrictions imposed and curtailment of civic rights. Unpacking the local/global intricacies of these narratives helps us understand the ubiquity of contemporary anti-government and anti-establishment discourse propelled by the far-right but also its malleability and flexibility in terms of how it is made to fit different political contexts and scenarios across liberal democracies. 

Who is afraid of gender? Judith Butler provocatively asks in her latest book addressing the polarised controversies stirred by the concept of gender in recent years. Her question is posed amid a surge of conservative and far-right movements that have significantly fuelled antagonism around gender debates far beyond the relatively niche circles that have traditionally been preoccupied with its conceptualisation and implications. In these debates, what Butler (2024) dubs “the phantasm of gender” is invoked as a threat to Western civilisation, a denial of nature, an attack on masculinity and “traditional family values”, or an effacement of the differences between sexes. Across Europe, such ideas have been propagated, in particular by actors within the so-called anti-gender ideology movement that leverages various forms of activism to undermine the rights of women and queer and trans people in areas from reproductive justice to protections against gendered violence. But even beyond these highly politicised circles, gender does indeed seem to have become a source of division in public discourse to the extent that the toxicity which increasingly surrounds the notion has been reported to discourage scholars and journalists alike from even engaging with the issue in public debate (Bladini, 2020; Møller Hartley & Askanius, 2021; Paternotte, 2019).

This article explores the discursive linkages between violent misogyny and violent right-wing extremism in the popular Swedish online discussion forum Flashback, which affords anonymous and relatively unmoderated commenting. Empirically, it focuses on the articulations of misogyny and anti-feminism mapped onto extreme right ideology including white supremacism in user comments posted across 16 Flashback threads. To analyze the extensive data set, we first drew on a collocation analysis of user comments (N = 20,359) scraped from a strategic selection of threads. From this sample we chose 36 combinations to be considered for a closer reading. In the second analytical step, critical discourse analysis coupled with the Essex School’s logics approach helped us unpack the logics of conspiracy and male entitlement, as well as the fantasmatic projections of Swedish women as both “race traitors” and “victims” at the heart of extreme right discourse in and beyond Sweden today.

This report takes the 2024 European Parliament elections as an entry point to examine translocal articulations of everyday extremism in and across three European countries and regions: Sweden (northern Europe), Austria (central Europe), and Bulgaria (eastern Europe). Drawing on hybrid ethnographic fieldwork and visual analysis of memes and other visual artefacts, we trace everyday political discussions surrounding the EP election campaigns in each country to examine how extremist narratives occur around contentious issues and how these are negotiated across online and offline spaces. The multi-sited research design allows us to shed light on differences and similarities in how violent rhetoric and political extremism emerge across different European contexts during a significant political event shared by citizens. By offering in-depth insights from three countries, the report contributes to a deeper understanding of the challenges facing European cohesion in a time of rising political extremism and polarization within the European Union.

This paper examines prevalent tropes of sexual violence circulating in contemporary far-right discourse in and around Sweden. Our analysis draws on a data set of memes (n=120) that have been collected over an extended period of time and in the context of several research projects on far-right extremism in Sweden and the online cultures and platforms that undergird the movement. They originate from a wide variety of actors and have been circulated in a range of different online spaces, across the spectrum of mainstream social media to fringe subcultural forums. The common denominator to the motley array of visual ephemera in the data set is that all depict scenes of sexual violence, most often including rape, in a cartoonish, humorous and transgressive manner. By turning our attention to such visual materials, we respond to calls for further research on ‘the role that exploitative sexual images – including child pornography, ‘rape fantasy’ iconography and other misogynistic images – play in far right and white supremacist extremist cultures’ (Miller-Idriss 2020, p. 489).  We explore a series of discursive figures and anthropomorphised representations of Sweden identified across these memes. These include Captain Sweden – a proxy for Sweden as a “cucked“ nation and a way of signaling resentment towards multiculturalism, progressive movements and liberal politics more generally, The Swedish Soyboy as an emblem of a feminized, castrated and perverted state, The Rapefugee invoking the threat of the abject (Muslim) Other and finally the Swedish woman who occurs in contradictory form as both slut, victim and race traitor. Combining Discourse Analysis with techniques from visual analysis of far-right digital cultures, we ask: What is the scene of rape? What are its key memetic tropes enacting in a discursive sense? How can we understand these iterations of sexual violation as key fantasmatic scenes of contemporary fascism? Based on the analysis, we argue that these tropes serve as important instantiations of contemporary far-right ideology, forming nodal points in the articulation of the pervasive narratives surrounding the country’s perceived decline and crisis circulating on the far right Furthermore, beyond the immediate context of Swedish far-right discourse, the gendered and sexualised Sweden-memes articulated around fantasies of perversion and abjection have evolved into emblems of Western moral degeneration, sexual decay, and a loss of male power across liberal democracies more generally.