Abstract

Since a few high-profile terrorist attacks in 2019 in Europe, the United States, and New Zealand, as well as the growing online presence of right-wing extremists, academics have become increasingly concerned with the threat of violent terrorism from the so-called “far-right.” However, many recent analyses and threat assessments rely on incomplete and inconsistent data, leading to misconceptions about the current threat landscape. At the same time, more reliable and systematic data is now being produced and shared by leading institutions in the field. In this talk, I will briefly discuss some of the main limitations of existing datasets, before introducing the Right-Wing Terrorism and Violence (RTV) dataset. Subsequently, by drawing on the RTV dataset and its US equivalent – the United States Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) – I highlight five key trends : 1) there is no major increase in right-wing violence and terrorism in the Western world, 2) fatal terrorist and violent attacks by the far-right is almost exclusively committed by actors operating alone, 3) the most common form of right-wing violence is spontaneous violence perpetrated by gangs and unorganized groups, 4) the nature of far-right violence and terrorism is still very much influenced by the national, if not regional and local, context and 5) far-right violence is characterized by what we might call a ‘heterogeneous target selection’. Finally, I discuss some of the most important implications of these findings.