The Far-Right in World Politics

This book addresses the reasons why the contemporary far-right has gained political resonance in a variety of states across both the Global North and South. The rise of far-right forms of politics in recent years throughout a range of geopolitical locales suggests the emergence of a distinct conjuncture in world politics, indicating a common set of enabling conditions and characteristics. It is this unprecedented context in the history of the post-war liberal international order that this edited volume aims to address. In doing so, it brings together a diverse range of scholars, many of whom have developed an internationally recognized expertise in the study of the far-right and International Relations (IR).

Reflecting a plurality of methodological and theoretical perspectives, the chapters cover a variety of theoretical and conceptual issues, including analyses of different geopolitical and national expressions of the contemporary far-right. Notwithstanding such diversity, the primary analytical focus of the book is to situate and explain the far-right as a distinct part of the history of modern international relations especially with respect to the development of and crises within the contemporary international order. From this perspective, the contributions combine to demonstrate the deeply embedded symptoms of far-right politics centred on racialized imaginaries across the globe and re-produced within the sinews of an evolving liberal international order even as the far-right also represents an antagonism to some elements of said order.

Providing a much-needed global perspective, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of populism, far-right politics, conservatism and international relations. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations and are accompanied by a new epilogue.

Alexander Anievas is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Capital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914-1945 (2014) and co-author of How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitics Origins of Capitalism (2015).

Richard Saull is Reader in International Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published widely on the international history and politics of the far-right and is the author of Capital, Race and Space in two volumes (2023).