In the Name of the Race: Exploring the Ideologies of White Supremacist Attacks

• In Event: Radical Extremism

Abstract

This paper analyzes White Supremacy terrorism. An increasing international phenomenon, perpetrators of such violence have carried out attacks around the globe in places including Norway (2011), Kansas (2014), West Yorkshire (2016), Quebec City (2017), San Diego (2019), New-Zealand (2019), el-Paso (2019), Hanau (2020) and California (2020). While often labelled as individual ‘lone-wolf’ incidents due to differences in targeted minorities, types of attacks, and the lack of organizational structure linking perpetrators together, attackers are increasingly using similar motivational rhetoric and citing a broad allegiance to each other as well as to shared ideological premises. Exploring this, this study argues that rather than analyzing these attackers solely as radicalized individuals, perpetrators of such acts are better understood as local actors within a loosely affiliated transnational movement. Similar to other such movements – whether international Salafism or transnational Communism – while adherents share broad international ideals it is the localizing process, i.e. embedding international agendas into contextual grievances and specific socio-political circumstances, that gives each actor its unique characteristics.
Substantiating these arguments, this study consists of two sections. The first, aiming to build a profile of this emerging international movement, utilizes the tools of social movement research to analyze the manifestos, statements, and ideological texts, of the different attackers. Situating these in a comparative perspective, I analyze the ways in which perpetrators diagnose their grievances, prognose solutions, and link these perceptions to motivations for violence, identifying the points of congruence among the various perpetrators. This allows for an initial construction of the movement’s profile, identifying the core tenets tying the network together and enabling the analysis of how these ideas are disseminated.
Building upon this first phase, the second phase focuses on the differences between actors. Just as with any transnational movement, contextual circumstances and the unique structure of political opportunities and constraints lead local actors to embrace particular aspects of the larger movement while abandoning others. Focusing on this localizing process, I explore what adjustments were made by the different perpetrators with regards to the larger international White Supremacy movement, linking these adjustments to the particular violent tactics and attack styles used by each attacker. Such an exploration sheds light on why perpetrators citing broadly similar xenophobic ideals choose different minorities as targets, accounting for divergent patterns of violence and pinpointing the local political facets that influence this localizing process. This paper presents the initial findings of both phases of analysis.

Author

• Alon Burstein, University of California, Irvine