'Stormfront Is Like a Second Home to Me': On Virtual Community Formation by Right-Wing Extremists'

ABSTRACT Although the subject of extreme right virtual community formation is often discussed, an online ‘sense of community’ among right-wing extremists has not been systematically analysed. It is argued that to study this phenomenon and to understand its backgrounds and function, the offline and online experiences and actions of those involved need to be taken into account. For this purpose, qualitative data has been collected on the web forum ‘Stormfront’, supplemented by extensive online interviews with eleven of its members. It is demonstrated that those experiencing stigmatisation in offline social life regard the forum as a virtual community that functions as an online refuge, whereas those who – due to special circumstances – do not experience offline stigmatisation do not display an online sense of community. It is concluded that offline stigmatisation underlies virtual community formation by Dutch right-wing extremists. Because this mechanism may have broader significance, additional hypotheses for future research are formulated

Toevluchtsoord voor een bedreigde soort. Over virtuele gemeenschapsvorming door rechts-extremisten

textabstractStormfront, het grootste rechts-extremistische internetforum in het Nederlandse taalgebied, fungeert als een virtueel toevluchtsoord. Gedeelde ervaringen van sociale uitsluiting door een samenleving waarin individuele vrijheid en tolerantie hoog in het vaandel staan, vormen volgens Willem de Koster en Dick Houtman de drijvende kracht achter rechts-extremistische virtuele gemeenschapsvorming op Stormfront. Drawing on data collected on the web forum of the Dutch branch of 'Stormfront White Nationalist Community', supplemented by extensive online interviews with eleven of its participants, this paper studies extreme-right virtual community formation. It is demonstrated that shared experiences of social exclusion and stigmatisation in offline social life engender a longing for a virtual haven in which one can freely and anonymously express one's political ideas, 'be oneself', and enjoy the company and support of like-minded spirits. This reveals the social significance of late modernity's emphasis on individual liberty and tolerance. The latter does not simply mean that social behaviour has become less subject to moral regulation, but rather that this type of individualism has become a coercive regime itself, generating its own social exclusion, just like any other discourse does

Van God los: Post-Christelijk cultureel conflict in Nederland.

Internationale waarnemers verbazen zich al tijden over het verhitte integratiedebat dat in Nederland woedt. Ze vragen zich af hoe zoiets mogelijk is in een land dat bekendstaat als baken van seculiere tolerantie. Dit roept de vraag op hoe etnische tolerantie en afwijzing van traditionele christelijke stellingnamen over morele vraagstukken zich tot elkaar verhouden. In dit artikel onderzoeken we daarom of en waarom het aanhangen van een post-Christelijke moraal voor sommigen leidt tot etnische intolerantie, terwijl het voor anderen samengaat met etnische tolerantie

De opkomst van de strafstaat: Neo-liberalisering of een nieuwe politieke cultuur?

Dat in westerse landen steeds meer mensen in de gevangenis lijken te zitten is volgens een invloedrijke theorie het gevolg van economische neo-liberalisering. In dit artikel formuleren we een alternatieve verklaring gebaseerd op de opkomst van een nieuwe politieke cultuur. Na een analyse van de vermeende groei van gevangenispopulaties toetsen we de houdbaarheid van beide theorieën

The Rise of the Penal State: Neo-Liberalisation or New Political Culture?

Imprisonment rates are presumed to have risen in the west, and it is argued by certain social scientists that this can be explained by a comprehensive process of economic neoliberalisation. In this paper, we develop an alternative explanation, focussing on the rise of a ‘new political culture’. Longitudinal cross-national analyses are performed to test the tenability of these theories. First, it is demonstrated that some countries have been witnessing a trend of penalisation, but that there is no overall trend. Second, economic explanations for variations in imprisonment rates prove to be untenable. Third, it is shown that a new-rightist demand for social order, which is not found to be inspired by economic neo-liberalisation, provides a better explanation. This leads to the conclusion that high incarceration rates can be understood as being part of a right-authoritarian politico-cultural complex

The Rise of the Penal State: Neo-Liberalisation or New Political Culture?

Imprisonment rates are presumed to have risen in the west, and it is argued by certain social scientists that this can be explained by a comprehensive process of economic neoliberalisation. In this paper, we develop an alternative explanation, focussing on the rise of a ‘new political culture’. Longitudinal cross-national analyses are performed to test the tenability of these theories. First, it is demonstrated that some countries have been witnessing a trend of penalisation, but that there is no overall trend. Second, economic explanations for variations in imprisonment rates prove to be untenable. Third, it is shown that a new-rightist demand for social order, which is not found to be inspired by economic neo-liberalisation, provides a better explanation. This leads to the conclusion that high incarceration rates can be understood as being part of a right-authoritarian politico-cultural complex

‘Sommigen zijn gelijker dan anderen’: Economisch egalitarisme en verzorgingsstaatschauvinisme in Nederland.

Laagopgeleiden zijn meer dan hoogopgeleiden geneigd om voorkeur voor economische herverdeling gepaard te laten gaan met afkeer van sociale voorzieningen ten bate van etnische minderheden. Waarom zijn zij van mening dat sommigen gelijker zijn dan anderen? In dit artikel wordt onderzocht of hun opmerkelijke combinatie van economisch egalitarisme en ‘verzorgingsstaatschauvinisme’ voortkomt uit gebrekkige politieke competentie, hun zwakke economische positie of hun geringe cultureel kapitaal en de culturele onzekerheid die daarmee gepaard gaat

A christian cancellation of the secularist truce? Waning christian religiosity and waxing religious deprivatization in the west

Analysis of International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data collected in 18 Western countries in 1998 demonstrates that Christian desires for a public role of religion are strongest in countries where Christian religiosity is numerically most marginal. Moreover, Dutch data covering the period 1970-1996 confirm that the decline of the number of Christians in the Netherlands has been coincided by a strengthening of the call for public religion among the remaining faithful and by increased polarization about this with the nonreligious. Religious decline and religious privatization, two of the most crucial dimensions of secularization (Casanova 1994), hence develop dialectically: as the number of Christians declines, the remaining faithful seem increasingly unwilling to accept the " secularist truce" -the secularist contract that guarantees religious freedom yet bans religion from the public sphere by relegating it to the private realm

Dialectiek van secularisering: Hoe de afname van christelijke religiositeit samengaat met een sterkere nadruk op haar publieke belang in achttien westerse landen

In dit artikel wordt onderzocht of twee centrale aspecten van secularisering hand in hand gaan: een afname van het aantal christenen en een toenemende privatisering van het christelijk geloof. Via een analyse van gegevens over achttien westerse landen en voor Nederland over de periode van 1970 tot 1996 laat dit artikel zien dat afnemende christelijke kerkelijkheid opmerke

Christian Religion in the West: Privatization or Public Revitalization?

1. Introduction “After nearly three centuries of utterly failed prophesies and misrepresentations of both present and past, it seems time to carry the secularization doctrine to the graveyard of failed theories, and there to whisper ‘requiescat in pace’” (Stark 1999: 269). Stark’s words, published just before the turn of the century, may count on much approval among sociologists of religion today. Secularization theory has been discredited because of its inability to account for religious change in the modern world (e.g., Berger, 1999; Heelas and Woodhead, 2005; Houtman and Mascini, 2002) and because of its sheer broadness and lack of specificity, as emphasized by Hadden (1987: 587), for instance, when he noted that it is a “hotchpotch of loosely employed ideas rather than a systematic theory”. Secularization theory’s two principal subtheses, the ‘decline-of-religion thesis’ and the ‘privatization thesis’ (Casanova, 1994), have both become increasingly contested and recent research even suggests that these two aspects of secularization may develop in a remarkably uneven way. That idea is put forward by Achterberg et al. (2009), who point out that the decline of Christian religion in the West spawns its public revitalization rather than its further privatization. This paper elaborates on this by assessing the empirical merits of two objections that suggest that these recent findings may after all not contradict the established notion that religious decline and religious privatization occur in tandem