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Focusing on extremism won’t counter far-Right violence

The main agents of rising far-Right violence are not ‘lone wolves.’ They are often connected to communities, legal entities, sometimes even to the state and elites

Focusing on extremism won’t counter far-Right violence
Police officers detain far-right demonstrators in Brussels, Belgium on 15 Septembre 2019 | Alexandros Michailidis / Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved
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Far-Right violence is on the rise in Europe. In fact, far-Right terror is one of the most important rising threats in the West, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, which compiles the Global Terrorism Index. In the period from 2002 to 2019, the US, Germany and the UK had the largest number of far-Right terror incidents in the West.

Worse than that, far-Right violence – decentralised anonymous attacks on political opponents and ethnic, religious and gender minorities – is significantly under-recorded for various institutional, methodological and conceptual reasons.

One reason is that most incidents of right-wing violence typically are not classed as terror attacks but as hate crimes or often even simply go into general criminal statistics.