"Urban, rural, world conspiracy?" New research article by Michael Krell published

Narratives about the city and the countryside are elementary components of right-wing extremist narratives. These usually consist of a devaluation of the big city, which has been repeatedly articulated in various ways in right-wing movements since the beginning of modernity. The countryside, on the other hand, becomes a place of longing where social conditions are still manageable and controllable.

In the new issue of the Zeitschrift für Rechtsextremismusforschung (ZRex ), Michael Krell, research associate at the Chair of Human Geography at TU Dresden, and Paul Nguyễn, research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography Leipzig (IfL), explore how such narratives about city and country are woven into the Free Saxons' attempts to mobilize. To this end, they are investigating how the far-right Saxon regional party writes about the city and the countryside in its magazine, Aufgewacht-Magazin. The results of the study show that the Free Saxons combine the spatial levels with conspiracy narratives and turn the city and countryside into scenes of an alleged world conspiracy - while conspiratorial elites who want to subjugate the people rule in the city, rural areas are idyllized as untouched nature and a gathering place for their own resistance movement. In this way, they try to charge the urban-rural conflict with misanthropic ideologies in order to mobilize supporters.

The research article can be read free of charge at the following link: Link