‘The far right from the underside of history: decolonising far-right studies’

Research on the far right is on the rise in dominant academia yet it remains securely anchored in the West. By this I mean that most of this research —be it theoretical or empirical— is concerned with either countries of the global North or heavy weights of the global south such as India or Brazil. Such a focus has had important epistemological, ethical, and political implications. In this piece, I aim at expounding on these implications by enacting a ‘decolonising’ movement of far-right studies that involves carrying out certain geographical and theoretical displacements. In order to do this, I recentre a case from the global south, Colombia, which despite constituting the exemplary success-story with regard to making ‘far-right’ ideology hegemonic —to the point that it has become transparent— has been consistently ignored from within this body of research. From at least the 1940s onwards, Colombia has served as a key geopolitical location for US military, capitalist, and neocolonial expansion in Latin America. Yet, up to very recently and because of its being the longest nominal democracy in the subcontinent, it has rarely been considered as a key-spot of far-right ideology and policies (in Colombia, Europe, and dominant Anglo-American academia). This has had catastrophic consequences for natives, peasants, and poor people in Colombia, on the one hand, and the environment (in Colombia and beyond), on the other. Starting from this geographical displacement, I claim that it is the mainstream theoretical framework to address the ‘far right’ which has helped obscuring the realities that make the Colombian case a paradigmatic example for understanding the issues at stake. Otherwise put: the specificities of this case reveal the limitations of the concepts —particularly of ‘populism’ and ‘far-right’ itself— and the theoretical framework of the mainstream approach to study the ‘far-right’. I make a case for the ‘decolonial critique’ (Rivera Cusicanqui 1990; Mendieta 2000; Mignolo 2000; Castro-Gómez 2010; Segato 2015; Giraldo 2016; Maldonado- Torres 2018) to be considered as a fit (perhaps even fitter) toolbox to address the issues at stake in what concerns the so called ‘far right’. The displacements I propose —which involve an enunciation from within the underside of history— do not aim at a simple inclusion of marginalised cases and theoretical approaches, i.e., diversifying, but at, to put it in Walter Mignolo’s terms, ‘changing the terms of the conversation’, i.e., decolonising. The field and our fight against these forces might benefit greatly.

This chapter appears in the collection The Ethics of Researching the Far Right: Critical Approaches and Reflections (Manchester University Press, 2024), edited by Antonia Vaughan, Joan Braune, Meghan Tinsley, and Aurelien Mondon.