Abstract
While the public views politics of sustainability and environment as progressive, if not leftist, in nature, researchers have been paying increasing attention to far-right versions of environmental politics. However, academic debates on far-right ecologism tend to revolve around two foci: the Nazi doctrine of blood and soil and its later offshoots, and contemporary far-right version of Malthusian politics to justify anti-immigration politics. These frames remain important, but they restrict ecological imagination of the contemporary far right. A set of more complex ecology-focused discourses has emerged on the far right where attention has in recent years been shifting from a national to a civilizational level, with civilizations increasingly viewed as ecological entities, each rooted in a particular landscape and biome. This paper focuses on the nascent civilizationist perspective on social and environmental sustainability, understood in way that is opposed to progressive conceptualizations, and examines how the fusion of ecological and cultural elements serves the far right’s attempts to naturalize belonging as well as exclusion on a transnational level.
Presenters
Rafal SoborskiProfessor, International Politics, Richmond American University London, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Economic, Social, and Cultural Context
KEYWORDS
Far-Right Ecologism, Eco-Fascism; Nativism; Civilizationism
