Forecasting Right Wing Extremist Violence in the West

• In Event: Terrorism II

Abstract

In the past decade, right wing extremism and terrorism has been on the rise in the United States and Europe. There has been no shortage of theories advanced as to the reasons for this increase, but these approaches have tended to have a very local focus. This has hindered attempts to think about causation more generally. Moreover, there have been few attempts to empirically evaluate whether changes in levels of factors such as racial composition, immigration, socioeconomic marginalization, religious conflict, and group threat are, in fact, related to increases in right wing violence. This study attempts to add to the empirical research on right wing extremist violence by using national data (and, to the extent possible, subnational data) from Western countries to test a range of causal factors over time. The results will be used to construct model that might better forecast how changes in contextual factors might be related to changing levels of right wing extremist violence.

Authors

• Garth Davies, Simon Fraser University

• Sara Doering, Simon Fraser University