By Aoife Gallagher

Research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has found that in the year since June 2022, anti-drag mobilisation in the UK has become a key focus for a variety of groups and actors. Anti-vaxxers, white nationalist groups, influential conspiracy theorists and “child protection” advocates have at times formed an uneasy – even fractious – coalition of groups opposing all-ages drag events. The driving force behind these protests is a mix of far-right groups and COVID-19 conspiracists.

While public debate about what is appropriate entertainment for children, and at what ages, is absolutely legitimate and deserves fair hearing, the identified tactics used by these actors only serve to undermine that discussion with chilling consequences for free expression, and create fertile ground for a potential uptick in violence. Furthermore, our analysis has found evidence that the UK is importing anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and strategies from similar movements in the US, with the “groomer” slur – used to frame LGBTQ+ people as a danger to children – becoming commonplace among anti-LGBTQ+ campaigners. Even though UK activity has not reached the level of violence seen in the US, abuse and harassment of hosts, performers and attendees at such events is a regular occurrence, and multiple events have been cancelled due to safety concerns. This report documents anti-drag activity in the UK by searching news reports, Twitter mentions and messages shared in relevant UK Telegram channels and groups. It outlines the actors involved, the tactics used and the impact of such activity between June 1, 2022 and May 27, 2023

Amman; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC: Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2023. 20p.

By Clara Martiny and Sabine Lawrence

This country profile provides an analysis of on- and offline anti-drag mobilization in the United States; key tactics used by groups and individuals protesting drag events; and principal narratives deployed against drag performers. Through ethnographic monitoring of relevant US-based Telegram channels, Twitter profiles, Facebook groups, and use of external resources such as the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), Crowd Counting Consortium, and previous reports on anti-drag activity by groups such as GLAAD and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), ISD analysts compiled, categorized and analyzed anti-drag protests or online threats against drag events from June 1, 2022 to May 20, 2023.

The findings of this research reveal that the first five months of 2023 have seen more incidents of anti-drag protests, online and offline threats, and violence (97 in total; average of 19.4 per month) than in the last seven months of 2022 (106 in total; average of 15.1 per month).1 Notably, ISD analysts find that the actors behind anti-drag activity are not just traditional anti-LGBTQ+ groups but include growing numbers of assorted other actors, from local extremists and white supremacists through to parents’ rights activists, members of anti-vaxxer groups, and Christian nationalists. ISD also finds an increasing number of incidents where online hate speech has manifested in offline activity – for example, a popular online slur being found spray painted on a location hosting a drag event. This report also shows the concerning upward trend of anti-drag mobilization across the US, and shows how it harms the LGBTQ+ community, small business, parents, and poses serious risks to community security throughout the nation. And, while public debate about what is appropriate entertainment for children, and at what ages, is absolutely legitimate and deserves fair hearing, the identified tactics only serve to undermine that discussion, with chilling consequences for free expression, and create fertile ground for a potential uptick in violence.

Amman; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC: Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2023.24p.

By Tim Squirrell and Jacob Davey

Internationally, rising hate and extremism pose an existential threat to human rights and democratic freedoms. LGBTQ+ communities are often the first group to come under attack, and understanding the contours of these assaults matters both for the protection of these communities and to be better able to safeguard human rights and democracy more broadly. In new research by ISD, including four country profiles, we examine the trends in anti-LGBTQ+ hate and extremism with a particular focus on harassment targeting all-ages drag shows. In this report, ISD analyses the narratives, themes, actors and tactics involved in anti-drag activism in the US, UK, Australia and France. It examines the footprint of 274 anti-drag mobilisations: 11 in Australia, 3 in France, 57 in the UK and 203 in the USA. Anti-drag activity was also found in Ireland, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland as well as other European countries during the reporting period, usually in isolated cases. Due to finite resources these instances were not analysed in depth, but would merit further research. This research draws on ethnographic monitoring of over 150 Telegram channels, Twitter profiles and Facebook groups, as well as external resources such as news reports, Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) and Crowd Counting and previous reports on anti-drag by GLAAD and the Southern Poverty Law.

Amman; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC: Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2023. 19p.

By Aoife Gallagher

Research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has found that in the year since June 2022, anti-drag mobilisation in the UK has become a key focus for a variety of groups and actors. Anti-vaxxers, white nationalist groups, influential conspiracy theorists and “child protection” advocates have at times formed an uneasy – even fractious – coalition of groups opposing all-ages drag events. The driving force behind these protests is a mix of far-right groups and COVID-19 conspiracists. …This report documents anti-drag activity in the UK by searching news reports, Twitter mentions and messages shared in relevant UK Telegram channels and groups. It outlines the actors involved, the tactics used and the impact of such activity between June 1, 2022 and May 27, 2023.

Amman; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC: Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2023. 20p.

By Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

The purpose of this Guide is to describe and analyze hate incidents and hate crimes faced by Roma and Sinti, as well as the corresponding security challenges. Considering cases from many of the 57 OSCE participating States, this Guide highlights measures that promote safety and security without discrimination, in line with OSCE commitments. This Guide provides relevant stakeholders - government offcials, political representatives, civil society and the broader public - with an overview of the situations Roma and Sinti communities face, an analysis of their corresponding security needs and areas where positive actions could improve their access to rights.

Warsaw: OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) , 2023. 138p.

By The Anti-Defamation League, Center for Technology & Society  

Over the past year, online hate and harassment rose sharply for adults and teens ages 13-17. Among adults, 52% reported being harassed online in their lifetime, the highest number we have seen in four years, up from 40% in 2022. Both adults and teens also reported being harassed within the past 12 months, up from 23% in 2022 to 33% in 2023 for adults and 36% to 51% for teens. Overall, reports of each type of hate and harassment increased by nearly every measure and within almost every demographic group. ADL conducts this nationally representative survey annually to find out how many American adults experience hate or harassment on social media; since 2022, we have surveyed teens ages 13-17 as well. The 2023 survey was conducted in March and April 2023 and spans the preceding 12 months. Online hate and harassment remain persistent and entrenched problems on social media platforms.

New York: ADL, 2023. 51p.

By Randolph Hohle

This book explains the emergence of two competing forms of black political representation that transformed the objectives and meanings of local action, created boundaries between national and local struggles for racial equality, and prompted a white response to the civil rights movement that set the stage for the neoliberal turn in US policy. Randolph Hohle questions some of the most basic assumptions about the civil rights movement, including the importance of non-violence, and the movement’s legacy on contemporary black politics. Non-violence was the effect of the movement’s emphasis on racially non-threatening good black citizens that, when contrasted to bad white responses of southern whites, severed the relationship between whiteness and good citizenship. Although the civil rights movement secured new legislative gains and influenced all subsequent social movements, pressure to be good black citizens and the subsequent marginalization of black authenticity have internally polarized and paralyzed contemporary black struggles. This book is the first systematic analysis of the civil rights movement that considers the importance of authenticity, the body, and ethics in political struggles. It bridges the gap between the study of race, politics, and social movement studies.

New York; London: Routledge, 2013. 188p.

Edited by Vishwas Satgar

"Racism after Apartheid, volume four of the Democratic Marxism series, brings together leading scholars and activists from around the world studying and challenging racism. In eleven thematically rich and conceptually informed chapters, the contributors interrogate the complex nexus of questions surrounding race and relations of oppression as they are played out in the global South and global North. Their work challenges Marxism and anti-racism to take these lived realities seriously and consistently struggle to build human solidarities."

Johannesburg " Wits University Press. 2019. 264p.

By Lee D. Baker

In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. At the same time, they were committed to salvaging “disappearing” Native American culture by curating objects, narrating practices, and recording languages. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Lee D. Baker examines theories of race and culture developed by American anthropologists during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. He investigates the role that ethnologists played in creating a racial politics of culture in which Indians had a culture worthy of preservation and exhibition while African Americans did not. Baker argues that the concept of culture developed by ethnologists to understand American Indian languages and customs in the nineteenth century formed the basis of the anthropological concept of race eventually used to confront “the Negro problem” in the twentieth century. As he explores the implications of anthropology’s different approaches to African Americans and Native Americans, and the field’s different but overlapping theories of race and culture, Baker delves into the careers of prominent anthropologists and ethnologists, including James Mooney Jr., Frederic W. Putnam, Daniel G. Brinton, and Franz Boas. His analysis takes into account not only scientific societies, journals, museums, and universities, but also the development of sociology in the United States, African American and Native American activists and intellectuals, philanthropy, the media, and government entities from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Supreme Court. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Baker tells how anthropology has both responded to and helped shape ideas about race and culture in the United States, and how its ideas have been appropriated (and misappropriated) to wildly different ends.

Durham, NC: London: Duke University Press, 2010. 294p.

By Jonathan Hsy

How do marginalized communities across the globe use the medieval past to combat racism, educate the public, and create a just world? Jonathan Hsy advances urgent academic and public conversations about race and appropriations of the medieval past in popular culture and the arts. Examining poetry, fiction, journalism, and performances, Hsy shows how cultural icons such as Frederick Douglass, Wong Chin Foo, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Sui Sin Far reinvented medieval traditions to promote social change. Contemporary Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and multiracial artists embrace diverse pasts to build better futures. “Makes the crucial move of tying medievalism studies readings to social and racial justice work explicitly … innovative and greatly needed in the field.” Seeta Chaganti, author of Strange Footing “A major accomplishment that belongs on the shelves of every person who believes in antiracism.” Geraldine Heng, author of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

Leeds, UK:  Arc Humanities Press,, 2021. 180p.

By Hannah Noel

Details the appropriation of social justice rhetoric to claim Whiteness as an aggrieved social status, enabling White supremacy and deepening racial inequities.

Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press,  2022.  236p.

Edited by Ayhan Kaya, Ayşenur Benevento and  Metin Koca

This book analyses the factors and processes behind radicalisation of both native and self-identified Muslim youths. It argues that European youth responds differently to the challenges posed by contemporary flows of globalisation such as deindustrialisation, socio-economic, political, spatial, and psychological forms of deprivation, humiliation, and structural exclusion. The book revisits social, economic, political, and psychological drivers of radicalisation and challenges contemporary uses of the term “radicalism”. It argues that neoliberal forms of governance are often responsible for associating radicalism with extremism, terrorism, fundamentalism, and violence. It will appeal to students and scholars of migration, minority studies, nationalisms, European studies, sociology, political science, and psychology.

New York: London: Routledge, 2023. 262p.

By Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

On 29 September 2015 a motorcade comprising a number of cars holding Afonso Dhlakama, his aides, and soldiers drove along a main road from Chimoio in central Mozambique toward the city of Nampula when they were attacked—apparently by the forces of the Mozambican state. Dhlakama, the long-term leader of Renamo, the country’s largest opposition party, had just spoken at a rally in Chimoio. The attack left a number of people dead, but Dhlakama himself allegedly escaped quite spectacularly: He transmogrified into a bird, a partridge—the symbol of his party Renamo—spread his wings, and fl ew off. Various and conflicting accounts of the attack broke on social media a mere hour after it happened. However, a key element in coverage in Mozambican papers and on social media was that so-called traditional leaders confirmed Dhlakama’s transmogrification and escape (Cuna 2015). I spoke with my interlocutors in nearby Chimoio and Honde by telephone in the days that followed, and they also confirmed the story, with one elderly man expressing with some glee, “The state should have known he would escape like that! Dhlakama has a lot of power from tradition.” This book is not only about disentangling key national events such as these—events where forces of the state allegedly seek to eradicate the leader of the political opposition by violence, or about what could easily be labeled beliefs, cosmologies, even ontologies of this particular part of Mozambique. Rather, it examines the multiplex, historical, and contemporary relations between hierarchically oriented structures, state (for short), and what lies beyond: the domain of the social, including what is often referred to as “tradition.”  

New York: London: Berghahn Books, 2016. 360p.

Edited by Giacomo Loperfido

Extremism does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, extremism is a relative concept that often emerges in crisis situations, taking shape within the tense and contradictory relations that tie marginal spaces, state orders, and mainstream culture. This collected volume brings together leading anthropologists and cultural analysts to offer a concise look at the narratives, symbolic, and metaphoric fields related to extremism, systematizing an approach to extremism, and placing these ideologies into historical, political, and geo-systemic contexts.

New York; Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books 2021. 194p.

By Derek Hirst

FROM THE PREFACE: “The series of which this volume is a part is intended to provide a narrative history of modern England. A narrative is particularly suited to relating political history - all the more so, perhaps, in a period of civil war and revolution, when so many actions and initia- tives turn out to have been largely reactions to other events in a continuing crisis. Other developments too can appropriately be dis- cussed i na narrative framework. Economic depression, or works of political thought, for example, have claims to inclusion in a narrative history of the period which produced them as legitimate as those they have to inclusion in the thematic surveys in which they more frequently figure. The supremely important developments in Scotland and Ireland in this period can also be integrated. Certain enduring features of English life - social and economic, religious and intellec- tual, even political - do, however, seem unsuited to such treatment. The narrative in this book is therefore prefaced by three detailed introductory chapters which are intended to set the course of events in a broader context….”

Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press. 1986. 398p. USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP.

By Hussein Solomon

What are the factors which have made South Africa so appealing to terrorist and radical islamic organisations? What role has South Africa played within global Jihad? This book examines how South Africa has come to play a major role in global terror networks stemming from growing criminality and corruption within state structures. It also examines the interaction between local and foreign extremist elements which undermine South Africa’s security. The author brings the discussion beyond the usual mundane academic treatise to the sharp reality of the global dangers of politicised Islam – a muslim talking candidly about Islam.

Bloemfontein,  UJ Press, 2013. 149p.

By Christina Parolin

Radical Spaces explores the rise of popular radicalism in London between 1790 and 1845 through key sites of radical assembly: the prison, the tavern and the radical theatre. Access to spaces in which to meet, agitate and debate provided those excluded from the formal arenas of the political nation–the great majority of the population–a crucial voice in the public sphere. Radical Spaces utilises both textual and visual public records, private correspondence and the secret service reports from the files of the Home Office to shed new light on the rise of plebeian radicalism in the metropolis. It brings the gendered nature of such sites to the fore, finding women where none were thought to gather, and reveals that despite the diversity in these spaces, there existed a dynamic and symbiotic relationship between radical culture and the sites in which it operated. These venues were both shaped by and helped to shape the political identity of a generation of radical men and women who envisioned a new social and political order for Britain.

Canberra: ANU Press, 2010. 352p.

Edited by Charles Asher Small

This volume contains a selection of essays based on papers presented at a conference organized at Yale University and hosted by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) and the International Association for the Study of Antisemitism (IASA), entitled “Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity.” The essays are written by scholars from a wide array of disciplines, intellectual backgrounds, and perspectives, and address the conference’s two inter-related areas of focus: global antisemitism and the crisis of modernity currently affecting the core elements of Western society and civilization.

Leiden; Boston: Brill | Nijhoff, 2013. 364p.

By Tanya Dreher

This research monograph documents and analyses the many ways in which communities experiencing racism after September 11, 2001 have responded to increased prejudice, harassment and discrimination. While much research analyses the 'problem' of racism, this book highlights the responses developed by targeted communities, including strategies of Interfaith, cross-cultural education, media responses and community cultural development work. A follow-up to the 2006 work Targeted, the research underlying this book is based on extensive community consultations and interviews with Arab, Muslim and Sikh communities in Sydney. It maps the field and identifies common challenges with the aim of contributing to wider processes of innovation in community anti-racism work.

Broadway: UTS ePRESS, 2006. 47p.

By  Jacob Davey, Cécile Simmons, Mario Peucker

The re-emergence of Australia’s far-right in the mid-2010s saw an unprecedented level of online mobilisation and a wave of street protests across the country which were often met with counter-protests by anti-racist and anti-fascist networks, most of them associated with far-left groups. This often resulted in clashes, sometimes violent, between opposed political groups. Potentially violent threats associated with the far-right and, to a significantly lower degree, far-left mobilisation in Australia have become the subject of growing concern for government- and public authorities in recent years.  This demonstrates a shift in understanding of the radical, extremist and terrorist landscape beyond what Australia’s intelligence apparatus now refers to as religiously motivated violent extremism. However, evidence of threats posed by far-left actions remains limited, while the full extent and impact of far-right fringe and extremist activity continues to be investigated by researchers.

Beirut; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC : Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 2022. 19p.