In this episode, we speak with Agnieszka Pasieka about young far-right activists in Poland, Hungary, and Italy. In her research, the anthropologist examines the role that intergenerational relations, biographical experiences, and the social dynamics within activist groups play in the emergence and persistence of far-right activism. Pasieka highlights the striking heterogeneity of the life stories she encountered during her fieldwork and, on this basis, challenges the dominant narrative in research on right-wing extremism according to which involvement in far-right groups should be understood primarily as a response to deprivation and biographical grievances. Instead, she emphasizes that participant observation enabled her to recognize the importance of the sense of belonging and community fostered through the everyday practices of activist groups. These everyday practices, she argues, are crucial to sustaining far-right activism. Pasieka concludes that effective democratic counterstrategies must create opportunities for everyday community-building and should offer meaningful alternatives to the isolation and commodification that characterize market society. 

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.

Hegemony and Great Moving Right Show

In this series, we inquire the rise of far-right extremism in Europe, drawing on theories of hegemony and cultural studies. Together with our guests, we focus on various European countries, their far-right parties and their voters. Against the backdrop of the multiple crises of recent decades, we examine the social experiences that the far right draws upon in constructing meanings in order to organize consensual political leadership. Finally, we discuss the resulting challenges for democracy and the strategies that can be employed to address this situation.

Conception and making: Kolja Lindner (Associate Professor of Political Theory at University Paris 8; 2025/26 visiting lecturer at Free University Berlin the German Academic Exchange Service) and Josephine Starke (doctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Leipzig; research associate at the Centre Marc Bloch).

Bibliographie

Agnieszka Pasieka (2019): Anthropology of the far right. What if we like the ‘unlikeable’ others? In: Anthropology Today, 35(1). 3-6. 

Agnieszka Pasieka (2023): Theft of Gramsci? On the radical right, radical left, and common sense. In: Dialectical Anthropology, 46(2022). 417-436.  

Agnieszka Pasieka: Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton 2025) 

Agnieszka Pasieka (2026): Dreams of the far Right. Online: https://aeon.co/essays/the-yearnings-that-take-young-europeans-into-the-far-right 

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