2020/04/17 by Ed Pertwee · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence #Race, History, and American Society
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/01419870.2020.1749688
openalex publication_date 2020/04/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
This article explores the “counter-jihad”, a transnational field of anti-Muslim political action that emerged in the mid-2000s, becoming a key tributary of the recent far-right insurgency and an important influence on the Trump presidency. The article draws on thematic analysis of content from counter-jihad websites and interviews with movement activists, sympathizers and opponents, in order to characterize the counter-jihad’s organizational infrastructure and political discourse and to theorize its relationship to fascism and other far-right tendencies. Although the political discourses of the counter-jihad, Trumpian Republicanism and the avowedly racist “Alt-Right” are not identical, I argue that all three tendencies share a common, counterrevolutionary temporal structure. Consequently, like “classical” Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, they can be seen as historically and contextually-specific forms of “revolutionary conservatism”.