Visualising far-right environments: Communication and the politics of nature

by Bernhard Forchtner (Editor)

Overview

This volume presents ground-breaking analyses of how the far right represents natural environments and environmentalism around the globe. Images are not simply pervasive in our increasingly visual culture – they are a means of proposing worlds to viewers. Accordingly, the book approaches the visual not as something ‘extra’ or ‘illustrative’ but as a key means of producing identities and ‘doing politics’. Putting visuality centre stage and covering political parties and non-party actors in Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Europe and the United States, contributors demonstrate the various ways in which the far right articulates natural environments and the rampant environmental crises of the twenty-first century, providing essential insights into such multifaceted politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526191311
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Series:	Global Studies of the Far Right
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Bernhard Forchtner is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester

Table of Contents

Studying the far right’s natural environments: towards a visual turn – Bernhard Forchtner
1 Right as rain: affective publics and the changing visual rhetoric of the far right in South Africa – Scott Burnett
2 The exclusivist claims of Pacific ecofascists: visual environmental communication by far-right groups in Australia and New Zealand – Kristy Campion and Justin Phillips
3 The National Socialist Movement of the United States and the turn to environmentalism: greenfingers or brownshirts? – Daniel Jones
4 The environmental semiotics of the Spanish far-right populism: Vox’s visual rhetoric strategies online – Carmen Aguilera-Carnerero
5 Purity and control: gender and visual environmental communication by the extreme right in Cyprus – Miranda Christou
6 The new Russian civilisation: Arctic fossil fuels, white masculinity, and the neo-fascist visual politics of the Izborskii Club – Sonja Pietiläinen
7 Not so green after all: visual representation of green issues by the far-right Kotlebovci – People’s Party Our Slovakia – Radka Vicenová, Veronika Oravcová and Matúš Mišík
8 From metapolitics to electoral communication: visualising ‘nature’ in the French far right – Zoé Carle
9 The murky world of ideologies: the (un)troubling overlaps in visual communication between Hungarian greens and far-right ecologists – Balša Lubarda
10 Homeland, cows and climate change: the visualisation of environmental issues by the far right in India – Mukul Sharma
11 Double vision: local environment and global climate change through the German far-right lens – Bernhard Forchtner and Jonathan Olsen
12 Talking heads and contrarian graphs: televising the Swedish far right’s climate denialism – Kjell Vowles
13 The (paranoid) style of American climate politics: a comparative visual rhetoric analysis of web design by far-right and left conspiracists in the United States – Lauren Cagle
Looking back, looking forward: some preliminary conclusions on the far right’s visualisation of its natural environments – Bernhard Forchtner
Index

Editorial Reviews

‘In the growing literature on the far right and the environment, too few works centre the visual politics that are so integral to extremist appeals. Forchtner and his collaborators work to address this lacuna. Novel in its focus, global in its scope, and rigorous in its analysis, Visualising far-right environments makes a necessary and compelling contribution to our understanding of the far right today.’
John Hultgren, Bennington College

‘A welcome, timely, and original contribution. This set of diverse global case studies richly analyzes the evergreen appeal of environmental and ecological claims—and their visual representations—to burgeoning far right movements around the world. An essential read.’
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Founding Director of the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at the American Universityin Washington, DC

'Visualising Far-Right Environments makes a significant contribution to the field by highlighting the crucial role of ‘the visual’ in far-right environmental communication. This focus on the visual aspect, but also the attention to party and nonparty actors and the global perspective makes this book an essential read for scholars, students, and practitioners interested in understanding far-right politics. By demonstrating the complex interplay between ideology, context, and strategy in far-right environmental communication, this book is essential for understanding and addressing the challenges posed by the far right’s engagement with environmental questions in contemporary politics.'
Gijs Lambrechts, Journal of Language and Politics

From the Publisher