Socially Distanced Solidarity: Far Right Recruitment and Enrolment During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Elucidating the impact of COVID-19 on collective action and political protests Countries around the world have used different strategies to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

For far-right organisations, the tactic of lockdown has impacted on their ability to recruit and enrol new members, which has repercussions for counter-radicalisation plans in the future.

The EU-funded SODIS project will investigate how such organisations have altered their recruitment strategies during this time, their success as well as how the routes to joining have shifted.

The project’s work will contribute to research on social movements, collective action and radicalisation studies in addition to providing insights for those working in the fields of countering radicalisation and recruitment.

The questions at the centre of the project Socially Distanced Solidarity: Far Right Recruitment and Enrolment During the COVID-19 Pandemic (SODIS) are how far right organisations have adapted recruitment strategies in time of crisis, namely the Covid-19 pandemic, how successful these strategies have been, and how pathways to joining have shifted as a result of the pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic provides an unprecedented opportunity to examine changes in collective action and political protest, providing a natural experiment for policy intended to tackle radicalism.

Due to lockdowns and partial lockdowns across the world, organisations have had to cancel protest activities and other events at the centre of many recruitment strategies; the ongoing threat of Covid-19 well into 2021 means that organisations must alter their strategies.

The subsequent change, or lack-there-of, in recruitment numbers can have implications for counter-radicalisation strategies moving forward.

SODIS relies on a modern research design focusing on various perspectives of organisation recruiters and new organisation members, and different national contexts, while taking advantage of this exceptional time in history.

A quantitative online survey will lend to a better understanding of motives and attitudes of organisations members in four national contexts and to gain a better understanding of motives for joining organisations, qualitative interviews will be conducted in each country.

SODIS will elucidate drivers of far right mobilisation and pathways to radicalisation, contributing to scholarship on social movements, collective action, and radicalisation studies.

It will provide insight for practitioners working on countering radicalism and recruitment into such organisations, engaging with the conversation of how liberal and illiberal democracies deal with right-wing extremism .