Blind Spot? Security narratives and far-Right violence in Europe

This paper discusses the challenges of countering far-Right political violence in the wake of the terrorist attack carried out by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway in July 2011. With brief case studies of Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium, it argues that classic neo-Nazi groups are being supplemented by new ‘counter-jihadist’ far-Right movements, which use…

An Unholy Alliance? Racism, religion and communalism

This October 2002 paper explored the contemporary trend in which the secular term ‘Asian’ was being displaced in the UK by religiously-coded definitions of identity, a process that was linked to the emergence of new, religious political/social movements and occasionally accompanied by violence between different South Asian communities in Britain. Potential links between Hindu and Sikh nationalist…

The death of multiculturalism

The official response to the summer 2001 riots in the northern towns of the UK is now taking shape. December saw the publication of the Cantle report [1], titled Community Cohesion, which defines the government’s strategy for maintaining order in those towns. [2] At the same time, Home Secretary Blunkett announced that the government was considering an…