Why do some segments of migrant-background populations support political projects that are explicitly anti-migrant and racist? In Germany, nearly one in five citizens with migration backgrounds expresses support for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right party with a hardline anti-migrant stance.
Studies on the European far-right rightly foreground racism as a key structuring force. But they rely on largely Eurocentric genealogies and therefore struggle to account for why racialised actors sometimes participate in the circulation of racism. This project addresses this blind spot by developing entangled racisms as a new conceptual framework for understanding how multiple racisms interact in diverse societies to fuel the far-right.
Rather than treating racisms shaped by different histories (e.g. European, post-Ottoman, post-socialist) as separate or merely intersecting, the project theorises them as dialogically co-constituted through processes of appropriation, translation, and rearticulation. While recognising the structural dominance of European racism, it rejects linear models in which racism flows only from Europe to its “others.” Instead, it shows how multiple racisms (e.g.Turkish racism against Kurds, Middle Eastern Anti-Black racism, and post-socialist hierarchies) entangle with existing racisms in Europe to produce unexpected political alignments.
The project draws on multi-sited fieldwork in Germany, a revealing case due to its diverse migrant population and contemporary far-right mobilisation. It combines interviews, participant observation, and analysis of official and civil society-generated data on racism and the far-right in Germany to trace how 1) multiple racisms become entangled, 2) far-right actors mobilise resonances across these entanglements, and 3) racialised migrant actors align with far-right projects.
By grounding far-right resurgence in the plurality and interaction of racisms, the project advances critical race theory, political sociology, and political anthropology. Its outcomes combine academic publications, community engagement, policy work, and literary fiction, supporting ISRF’s commitment to innovative, interdisciplinary research across the social sciences and humanities.