Search

This article approaches the process of opening accommodation centres from the perspective of mayors in rural municipalities. Although the allocation and accommodation of refugees is a competence of...

Very often, the opening of reception centres in rural areas depends on superordinate political levels. How do mayors in rural areas react to this decision? In our research, we interviewed mayors from Austria, France, Germany, and Italy and identified five commonly used strategies.

The Austrian report on the legal and policy framework of de-radicalisation and integration outlines how existing policies and laws address radicalisation and shows how dynamic this field has been over the past 20 years. The aim of the report is (1) to capture how existing policies and laws address radicalisation and (2) to connect the legislative and institutional framework to the socio-economic, political, and cultural context as well as to the constitutional making of the state. Regarding de-radicalisation, we cover punitive as well as primary, secondary, and tertiary measures and present two in-depth case studies that focus on urban and peri-urban youth. Through this overview of the legislation, on the one hand, and institutions as well as practical examples, on the other, we foreground critical aspects of the existing framework and best practices in Austria.

Although violent extremism and actual terrorist attacks are the exception in Austria compared to other countries, certain tendencies towards alienation, polarisation, and radicalisation have become increasingly observable in recent years. The most important strands in this context include right-wing extremism that has a long history in the country and Islamic extremism, a quite new phenomenon in Austria that culminated in the terror attack in Vienna in November 2020. In this report, we provide an indepth analysis of one example for each of these strands. In the realm of right-wing extremism, we introduce an action by the right-wing extremist group “Identitarian Movement” which took place in 2016 at the University of Vienna. Activists interrupted a play that was performed together with refugees, took the stage to unroll a banner and to spill fake blood in order to provoke calculated outrage. In the realm of Islamic extremism, we take a closer look at the attack in the inner city of Vienna in November 2020, when a single perpetrator and sympathizer of the terrorist militia Islamic State killed four people and injured more than twenty further victims. Comparing the micro, meso and motivational factors related to the cases, these two incidents show some similarities regarding grievance and polarisation, while the elements of injustice and alienation differ to some extent. Pronounced feelings of discontent seem to have been the driving force in both cases, while the element of injustice was approached from quite different angles, with the Identitarian Movement considering the very label “extremist” unjust. Macro factors have created a highly polarised political and societal environment that may nurture individual processes of radicalisation. Regarding right-wing and Islamic extremism, there seems to be a vicious cycle: people of Muslim faith have been the target of populist discourses in recent years and the far right has mobilised its followers using nativist, anti-Semitic and anti- Muslim rhetoric. This leads to an environment where people who are perceived as “the other” are structurally excluded and alienated. Macro factors thus intertwine and set the margins for both hotspots, even though the effects are quite different.

The present report aims at identifying and analysing cultural drivers of radicalisation in Austria, to explain the process of radicalisation, and to detect patterns of radicalised ideas and their mainstreaming through digital platforms. We focus on right-wing extremism because this is the most institutionalised strand of radicalisation that dominated Austrian post-war history. As right-wing extremism is a multi-faceted phenomenon, we include YouTube videos from two different actors, one inside and the other outside institutionalised politics. The first video stems from the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), an elected party which has successfully mobilised using right-wing populist hate speech and is currently part of the opposition. The second actor is the so-called “Generation Identity”, a right-wing extremist youth organisation that forms part of the “new right”. Both videos include online representations that are closely connected to concrete offline events. This allows for a comparative analysis of the events as such and of their representation in the online world. This is accompanied by an analysis of the reception of the messages conveyed in the videos by commentators. Both videos appear to be successful in mobilising support and in creating audiences. The video published by the FPÖ features a demonstration against government measures in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, advocating for basic rights and the freedom of speech and proclaiming a movement that “can no longer be stopped”, thus constructing a strong and powerful “us” element. The – more extreme – second example is a video published by the Generation Identity. The “we” proclaimed here is constituted by young Austrians without a migration background who are said to be “forgotten”. Contrary to the ideas featured in the FPÖ video, this video documents a disruptive action at a play that was performed together with refugees at the University of Vienna. The activists took over the stage to enrol a banner, dis-tribute leaflets, and spill fake blood. Though different in their expression and extent of extrem-ism, both videos display signs of perceived injustice and grievance, and both contribute to polarisation.

Violent extremism and terrorist attacks have been rare in Austria particularly compared to other countries. Nonetheless, certain tendencies towards radicalisation andalienation have been increasing and observable in recent years. The first Jihadist terror attack in Vienna in November 2020 was exceptional and a caesura in acountry with a very low number of casualties related to extremism. Still, hate speech and anti-Muslim as well as anti-immigrant sentiments are rather pronouncedand, in recent years, new kinds and unseen levels of hatred in the far-right spectrum were directed primarily at Austria’s Muslims and at refugees. This can be relatedto anti-Muslim discourses across the globe that gained strength in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the political repercussions of the summer ofmigration in 2015. Populist rhetoric by the political elite, most notably the Austrian Freedom Party and the Austrian People’s Party, is steering this process. A widerange of de-radicalization programmes aims at tackling the issue of radicalization in bottom-up and top-down approaches with a strong networking component.&nbsp

Book Review, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, Bd. 46 Nr. 1 (2017): Challenges of democratic inclusion: Investigating the politics of difference