Since 2017, the Danish far right party Stram Kurs has staged hundreds of Islamophobic demonstrations in neighbourhoods known for their ethnic minority and Muslim communities. Confrontational counterprotesters are filmed by far right activists who widely diffuse the footage on social media. These scenes of “native” bodies under duress from racialized others serve the far right as evidence of an incompatibility between racialized foreigners and the Danish ethnically defined nation. When far right activists subject their bodies to potential violence they are embodying nativism; dramatizing the threat of ethnic impurity to the nation. Embodied nativism denotes how actors imbue bodies with – and physically perform – values linked to essentialized ethnic categories to advance exclusionary claims. We develop this concept through visual analysis, utilizing images to show how scenes of embodied nativism exploit liberal frameworks of free speech, violence, and nonviolence; framing counterprotesters as racialized aggressors on the national body politic. 

The far-right social movement in Sweden is mobilizing against the purported threat to national order posed by the “badlands” of the nation. These are neighborhoods known for their diversity, crime, and poverty. “Badlands” also provide the far right with sites to criticize immigration and multiculturalism. Crucially, they also serve as a new kind of space that the far right uses to organize against what it believes to be a crisis of the state’s loss of the monopoly on violence and fears of the “replacement” of the ethnic majority. Through interviews with movement activists and ethnographic observations of private and public movement events, I show that the nostalgic “homelands and heartlands” frames, coupled with fears of the “badlands,” motivate far-right activists to participate in collective action. I find Sweden’s far-right relies on the interaction between nativism and territorial stigmatization to signify these urban spaces with crime, Islam, and minoritization.

Grievances of feeling silenced and excluded from public debates are central to the far right social movement’s claims internationally. Throughout 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Swedish movement and interviews with 30 activists, many activists whom I met shared with me a perceived stigma resulting from their ideology. But despite decades of research in the sociology of emotions linking stigma to the affect of shame, I encountered no open expressions of shame during my year and a half of fieldwork. This signals these activists’ absorption into an alternative normative order which insulates them from the shameful status devaluations imposed by others. Grounded theoretically in the work of Margaret Wetherell, I describe the affective practices of truth, love, and humour respondents employed in response to stigmatization. I recognise the instrumentality of these practices in the far right’s pursuit of a racialized and gendered hierarchy—while arguing they simultaneously promoted in-group cohesion and positive self evaluations. An ethnographic imperative to take the expressions of truth, love, and humour seriously but critically (instead of understanding them purely strategic smoke-screens) contributes to understandings of activist resilience and the persistence of far right activism over time, while developing emotional sociological approaches to the movement.

Establishing racialized, affective relationships to places is a crucial practice in sustaining the contemporary far right social movement. Building on spatial and emotional approaches to social movements, this article describes the functionality of various relationships to places I observed during my ethnography of the Swedish far right. Rural white regions are portrayed as neglected "places that don’t matter" and juxtaposed against multicultural urban areas viewed as centers of “immigrant crime.” In response, far-right activists create so-called safe spaces where white national identities—framed as marginalized—can be expressed free from social sanction. These spaces facilitate the formation of affective bonds through rituals and cultural practices, generating the emotional energy necessary to sustain the movement. These emotional and spatial dynamics are key to understanding the far right's resilience and persistence, offering broader insights into the emotional dimensions of social movements and the study of the far right.