White supremacy can be addictive, and leaving it behind can be like kicking a drug habit.

The 2016 election and the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this year have focused the attention of many on to the resurgence of far-right extremism and radicalization. In new research based on interviews with former white supremacists, Pete Simi, Kathleen Blee, Matthew DeMichele and Steven Windisch find that many of those involved in such movements consider themselves as having been ..

On the Permissibility of Homicidal Violence: Perspectives from Former U.S. White Supremacists

Drawing upon in-depth life-history interviews with 91 North American-based former white supremacists, we examine how participants perceive homicidal violence as either an appropriate or inappropriate political strategy. Based on the current findings, participants considered homicidal violence as largely inappropriate due to moral concerns and its politically ineffective nature but also discussed how homicidal violence could be an appropriate defensive measure in RAHOWA (Racial Holy War) or through divine mandate. Capturing how white supremacists frame the permissibility of homicidal violence is a step toward better understanding the “upper limit” or thresholds for violence among members who are trying to construct and negotiate a collective identity that involves violent and aggressive worldviews

Perspectives on “Giving Back”: A Conversation Between Researcher and Refugee

Our chapter—“Perspectives on ‘giving back’: A conversation between researcher and refugee”—offers personal reflections on the ethics of research with refugees and what it means for researchers to “give back” to refugee participants beyond “policy impact”. Written as a dialogue between an academic and a Rohingya refugee youth leader, we explore the blurry lines between academic work and advocacy when the issues of refugee protection are pressing, as well as the appropriateness of researchers giving monetary donations and volunteering for refugee causes as payback for data. In this chapter, we also examine what it means to build trust and relationships between researchers and refugees, and how too often researchers fail to develop meaningful research interactions with refugee participants who share their time, energy and personal stories of vulnerability

Social Movements and International Relations: A Relational Framework

Social movements are increasingly recognized as significant features of contemporary world politics, yet to date their treatment in international relations theory has tended to obfuscate the considerable diversity of these social formations, and the variegated interactions they may establish with state actors and different structures of world order. Highlighting the difficulties conventional liberal and critical approaches have in transcending conceptions of movements as moral entities, the article draws from two under-exploited literatures in the study of social movements in international relations, the English School and Social Systems Theory, to specify a wider range of analytical interactions between different categories of social movements and of world political structures. Moreover, by casting social movement phenomena as communications, the article opens international relations to consideration of the increasingly diverse trajectories and second-order effects produced by social movements as they interact with states, intergovernmental institutions, and transnational actors

Does Gender Matter in the United States Far-Right?

This article seeks to explain why it is difficult to understand how gender matters in the right, and suggest an analytic agenda for scholars who seek to do so