The 2010s saw an explosion of interest in the growth of the global far right. From the rise to power of right-wing populists like Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Boris Johnson in Great Britain, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and of course Donald Trump in America, to a spate of anti-immigrant shootings across the developed world, to the deadly violence at the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, the power and influence of far-right politics has been one of the defining features of the past decade. But the far right did not just suddenly form ex nihilio in the 2010s.

In this course we will explore the development and growth of the far right around the world in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a particular emphasis on how dynamics of power shape differences in the world and how social inequities are produced and patterned along lines of difference. This is not a comprehensive class – it is not possible to exhaustively explore every dimension of the international far right in the course of a single semester – so we will be focusing primarily on Western Europe and North America, but paying close attention to the concept of “empire,” its importance in the right-wing imagination in imperial states, and the impact of decolonization on far-right politics and what develops into the self-described “white power” movement at the end of the century.