ABOUT US
BACKGROUND
In recent years, the rise of far-right governments in Hungary, the US, and Brazil has posed a particular threat to democracy, normalizing intolerance and providing a fertile terrain for violent acts targeting minorities. A number of scholars has examined the intersection between the far-right and violent extremism, especially in the aftermath of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. Another group of researchers has been investigating the populist strategies used by charismatic leaders, going as far as to redefining fascism to explain contemporary regimes that stand in opposition to liberal democracy.
Overall, existing scholarship has been mainly focused on partisan politics and the mainstreaming of the far-right, neglecting the emergence of an active truth industry that has served to legitimise its agenda, giving nativist, homophobic, anti-semitic, Islamophobic, and sexist ideas the force of truth.
This project aims at filling this research gap. Based on a mixed-methods and a cross-platform approach, a group of researchers located in Europe, US, and Latin America is mapping media outlets, institutions, and/or political schools that have been producing authoritarian nativist discourses as 'truth' while examining discursive, affective, and geographical trends associated to them.
This work is based on three inter-related hypotheses: that digital media has facilitated the emergence of novel ways of claiming authority; that far-right leaning individuals/groups have taken advantage of that to legitimise nativist discourses, including stigmatizing conspiracy theories; that the far-right 'truth' industry has influenced people’s opinions in a way that can, ultimately, affect local/national elections.
WHAT IS MAFTI?
During a conference organised by the University of Edinburgh in December 2020 on the far-right and education, participants were invited to think about potential projects related to the topic. Beatriz Buarque, PhD candidate at the University of Manchester, suggested mapping the far-right 'truth' industry and Alex Thomin, from Tilburg University, promptly expressed interest in joining her. That was the beginning of MAFTI. In the next months, scholars from other countries completed the team.
MAFTI is an international group of scholars that is mapping far-right media outlets, think tanks, and/or political schools while examining the content produced by them.
The group is currently mapping the far-right 'truth' industry in Brazil, Germany, Italy, France, Netherlands, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States from a multidisciplinary perspective and using publicly available data as main object of investigation.