

An emerging body of research on far-right environmentalist communication (see e.g. Specifically, the main research question is how radicalisation strategies of the European far-right deploy a wide range of nuanced semiotic, linguistic and visual meaning-making resources in order to recruit potential new members, zooming in on exploiting the issue of climate change. This project focuses on the evolution of far- and extreme right ecofascist rhetoric in the global North. However, the weaponization of climate change and its exploitation by far-right populist political parties as well as white supremacist groups in the developed countries of the "global North" has received a lot less attention. Such rhetoric has been exacerbated by the climate crisis: recent research in environmental security has identified climate change as a threat multiplier and documented climate change-fuelled violence and conflict in the developing countries of the "global South" (Lyons, et al. The growing trend of Euro-scepticism and anti-immigration rhetoric of political parties (Ramalingham 2014b), which make up the "populist radical right" and "extreme right" (Mudde 2016) fraction of the EU, has also resulted in increasing levels of harassment of minorities.

The European Union (EU) faces a high-level security threat by the re-emergence of the far right, indicated by a recent significant increase in far-right violence (Ramalingham 2014a, Europol 2017): incidents such as harassment, intimidation, vigilante patrols, attacks on minorities and refugees, mosques, synagogues and asylum centres property vandalism and arson, which are often underreported to the police and by the media.
