Us and Them

Internet of the Far Rights
Otherness in the Websites of the French Far Right
By Caterina Froio
English

While identity politics lies at the core of far-right ideology, empirical studies on the representations of the Other remain idiosyncratic, i.e. mainly limited to one specific organization and/or outgroup. To address this gap, this article considers 77 websites of far-right organizations in France, and combines a quantitative Social Network Analysis (SNA) with a qualitative Content Analysis of the websites. I show that the network is organized around five clusters of websites describing the ingroup on the basis of political/civil and/or cultural/ethnic prejudices. In addition, the results reveal that some outgroups are common to over 90% of the websites in the network (e.g. the Muslim, the immigrant, the elite), while others appear less regularly (e.g. the homosexual, the Jew, the Rom). Overcoming idiosyncratic understandings, this comparative approach enables us to see how the representations of the ingroup and outgroup contribute to the creation of shared identities between far-right organizations, at least on the Internet.

Keywords

  • far right
  • identity politics
  • Internet
  • social network analysis
  • France
Go to the article on Cairn-int.info