Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe
Part of the Democracy in Troubled Times series
Content
In recent years, far-right movements have gained visibility across Europe, attracting a new generation of young activists. In this talk, anthropologist Agnieszka Pasieka draws on research from her book Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe to explore how far-right youth organize, build community, and frame their political identities. Based on extensive fieldwork with activists across multiple European countries, Pasieka examines the everyday practices, values, and networks that sustain these movements and help them move from the political margins toward broader cultural influence.
Rather than focusing only on ideology, Pasieka investigates how belonging, morality, and social engagement shape young people’s participation in far-right politics. Her work offers important insights into the appeal and normalization of far-right activism, shedding light on broader questions about democracy, political identity, and youth mobilization in contemporary Europe.
About the Speaker
Agnieszka Pasieka is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Montreal. Her work focuses on political mobilization, activism and social movements, and explores how different social actors mobilize to address inequality and power hierarchies and what kind of alternative world they envision. She is author of ‘Hierarchy and pluralism: living religious difference in Catholic Poland” (Palgrave 2015) and “Living right: far-right youth activists in contemporary Europe” (Princeton University Press), as well as numerous journal publications on religious pluralism, religious and ethnic minorities, multiculturalism, postsocialist transformation, and, most recently, far-right movements, transnational nationalism and fascism. Her new project tackles the problem of far-right environmental politics.