We can think of the far-right as a large category of groups with racist, alt-right, white supremacist, anti-immigrant, and anti-government attitudes. While these groups aren’t new to the United States, there’s evidence they’ve been gaining steam for at least a decade. But this isn’t unique to the US. It’s part of a much broader global phenomenon and we’ve seen groups with far-right sympathies begin organizing from Western Europe to Southeast Asia. In some European countries, we’ve even seen far-right groups with extremist tendencies doing relatively well in parliamentary elections.<\/p>\n

In terms of the rise of the far-right compared to other ideologies, if you look back through history you see pretty clear patterns of different ideologies gaining and losing prominence over time. The far-left was prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. Islamist and Jihadist terrorism came to the fore in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Now we are seeing a transition to the far-right. If we put this in a broader historical context, this is something that happens all the time where different ideologies rise and fall in line with global events, with dominant modes of thinking, and with other forces in society. It’s not something entirely unexpected.<\/p>\n\t

Q: What causes these fluctuations in the dominant ideology?<\/h2>\n\t 
\nThere are many different factors that shape which ideologies are dominant at any given moment. Political and economic forces are two of the most significant. For instance, which political actors and what political systems dominate? How are economies faring and transforming? Which global issues dominate public discourse? Which segments of society feel aggrieved? While specific grievances fluctuate over time, there are always going to be winners and losers from economic and technological changes, and this can inspire different ideologies to take hold. Social forces also matter. While this has to do with who’s winning and losing at any moment, dominant ideas and social frames can transcend borders. So, at any given moment, there are a multitude of forces working in different directions that influence which ideologies are relevant at any given time.\n\t

Q: How are you studying recruitment by these extremist groups?<\/h2>\n\t 
\nThis is a tricky topic since it’s hard to observe. We can only really study people who were successfully recruited, who are high-profile members, or who got arrested. We can’t always study people who almost joined a far-right group then decided not to since we might not know who they are.
\nAs a result, we use all available means to study a topic like this, so we’ll be using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative, statistical methods give us big-picture correlations and help identify cross-national trends that we maybe couldn’t see just by reading news stories, for instance. But with qualitative methods we’ll dive into particular groups and their recruitment tactics, and study specific individuals over time through interviews, journalistic reports, and court documents. This gives us the micro-level perspective that complements the big-picture statistical findings.\n

One of the things we’ll focus on for the US government is to look cross-nationally and identify important trends in the recruitment of certain types of people, like military veterans, police officers, and people with engineering and electrical expertise. From existing research, we know that some of these recruits have outsized impacts and are linked to particularly dangerous outcomes. Military veterans, for instance, were critical to the Islamic State’s battlefield effectiveness, and engineers were critical to Al Qaeda’s explosives capabilities. So we’ll look cross-nationally to figure out which types of recruits are most dangerous and to understand how they typically affect an organization once they’re recruited. This is important because in the US today, some groups on the far right are seeking out people with certain skills, and we’re trying to figure out how this might affect their attack capacity. Even the Pentagon has flagged the recruitment of its soldiers as a major problem.<\/p>\n

One of the things I’m most excited about is that with this grant from the Department of Homeland Security, I’ll be able to hire over a dozen undergrads in the next couple of years to work on this research with me. I’ll need help collecting data on who armed groups are recruiting and locating interviews and records about recruitment in the US. Personally, I got my start in political science when I was an undergraduate and took a course called the Politics of Terrorism that I absolutely loved. I started doing research with the professor and it got me hooked. I was ready to go to law school, but that one course really changed things for me, and I ended up doing a PhD instead. I want to give students at UConn that same opportunity.<\/p>\n\t

Q: Is your book related to this research?<\/h2>\n\t 
\nMy book is looking at a different but equally important topic: how armed groups like terrorists, insurgents, and rebels break apart, and when they do, how breakaway splinter groups behave. This is an important question because these groups are breaking apart all the time. In fact, about 30% of all armed groups are splinters, and it’s one of the most common pathways that armed groups to form. People might know about splinters like the Real Irish Republican Army that broke away from the Provisionals in 1998, or the Islamic State that by some accounts split from Al Qaeda in 2014.\n

My argument is that we have to look internally before these fractures even happen to understand what’s going on, and then use that information to anticipate which members are staying behind and which members are leaving to form the new group. That’s going to tell us how that splinter is going to differ and how it should eventually behave. And just as with the other project, it studies this statistically over time and across countries, but also through case studies of the Irish Republican Army, the Islamic State, and the Spanish terrorist group, ETA.<\/p>\n\t