Research on the contemporary far right has largely prioritised party-centred and electorally driven explanations, often overlooking the ideological, organisational, and relational infrastructures that sustain far-right mobilisation beyond formal political arenas. This seminar advances a transnational social movement perspective, conceptualising the far right as a networked ecosystem of parties, movements, cultural actors, and informal organisations operating across national borders.
The paper develops a multidimensional analytical framework centred on three interrelated dimensions of transnationalism: transnationally shared ideologies and identities, cross-national organisational structures, and coordinated practices. It refines existing approaches by introducing analytical gradients within each dimension, distinguishing between systemic and issue-specific ideological convergence, varying degrees of organisational integration, and episodic versus recurrent forms of joint action, as well as between full and partial transnationalism.
A core contribution lies in integrating far-right transnationalism with intelligence and security studies. The analysis proposes a tripartite typology of transnational networks—spontaneous, induced, and infiltrated—and further disaggregates induced transnationalism into direct, indirect, and combined forms, depending on whether collaboration with intelligence agencies occurs through explicit bilateral relationships, mediated covert structures, or hybrid configurations across domestic and international arenas. This distinction highlights the strategic and geopolitical conditions under which far-right networks are facilitated, instrumentalised, or reshaped.
By combining historical analysis with contemporary concerns over political violence, foreign fighting, and encrypted communication, the seminar challenges approaches that reduce transnationalism to online discourse or electoral coordination alone. It concludes by arguing for analytical models capable of tracing the organisational and operational infrastructures through which far-right ideas, resources, and practices circulate transnationally, with implications for social movement theory, security analysis, and democratic governance in an increasingly multipolar context.
Nicola Guerra is Adjunct Professor of Modern Italian History and Society at the University of Turku (Finland) and an independent researcher of political radicalism. His work explores the European far right in all its ideological and geopolitical complexity, from post-war political terrorism and political language to the entanglements of activism, intelligence networks, and hybrid anti-liberal currents such as Red-Brownism.