Interview: Should we reconcile with the far right? (Henrique Tavares Furtado)
This interview is based on Henrique Tavares Furtado’s article ‘Should We Reconcile with the Far Right? The 2024 Race Riots in Britain and the End of Post-Fascism.’
Henrique Tavares Furtado, “Should We Reconcile with the Far Right? The 2024 Race Riots in Britain and the End of Post-Fascism,” Global Studies Quarterly, 2026, 6(2), 1-13, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksag056.
The interview was conducted by Alex Yates.
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In the paper you argue that contemporary politics has been characterised by a post-fascist fantasy. How is the concept of fantasy useful in understanding post-fascism, and how could the 2024 race riots in the UK begin to dislodge the post-fascist fantasy?
I speak of fantasy in the broad, psychoanalytical sense of the term, as something similar to a theatrical play that happens inside one’s mind. Think of a play, any play you like…What does it consist of? How would you break that play down to its “molecular structure”, so to speak? I’d wager plays are built as an interconnected and organised set of scenes which tell individuals a story, where different characters are assigned different roles. The plot ultimately conveys lessons that will presumably help the audience cope with the problems they face. In far-right studies, the concept of post-fascism, which I borrowed from studies of the Italian radical and extreme rights, behaves in a similar way. It tells us a story in which fascism is a thing of the past. Of course, the fantasy recognise that fascists exist today, how could it not? But it does so only insofar as they are rendered toothless, as a political fringe, a subculture, with no real electoral force. According to this plot, the present-day far right abandoned the support for political violence and the forms of militarisation that were defining of past fascist movements, accepting the rules of the democratic game. That’s the underlying fantasy behind the distinction between the radical right and the extreme right, which dominates analyses in the field, with a few commendable exceptions. We can also see it at play behind what we call normalisation or mainstreaming: the transformation of the abhorrent talking points of the extreme right into the “legitimate concerns” of populists. Any potential links and similarities between the radical and extreme rights are covered over, brushed under the carpet of conceptual rigour.
Regarding what ensued in the wake of the Southport stabbings, I’m not sure the race riots dislodged the fantasy. In my view they were more like a glitch, an opening. The pogroms were clearly a consequence of, or at the very least preconditioned by decades of undisturbed normalisation of hatred and racialised conspiratorial thinking. They presented a glitch that provided a real chance to see echoes of the past in the present, to understand that both militarisation and the support for violence are central ideological elements of present-day far right movements, even if their form has changed. But here’s the thing: disrupting a fantasy only works if someone is brave enough to try, and it turned out, intellectual courage is a scarce commodity these days. Instead, what I saw was a series of disjointed efforts at patching up the fantasy of post-fascism, emphasising that most rioters came from left behind counties and so on…Very few people, including academics, said something along the lines of “look, this happened, and we might have been complicit in it”. That’s really hard work.
Continuing with the theme of fantasy, you describe how prominent public figures called for reconciliation in the wake of the riots and highlight how this approach wrongly assumes that the far right – whose demands are innately irreconcilable – are willing to get round the table. Why does this fantasy of reconciliation exercise such a grip over liberal commentators?
Because it’s hard to look at one’s reflexion in the mirror. It is hard to admit that us, liberal academics and liberal commentators, may have been instrumental in the normalisation of hatred. That’s what fantasies are for, to provide a buffer and protect us from having to do this hard work of self-reflection (no pun intended). It’s way easier to keep on blaming the poor and dreaming that an ideological movement whose main strategy is to continuously double down on exclusionary promises and radicalise its talking points will settle for a compromise. After Making America Great Again comes Making it Greater than Ever Before and at the end of all that there is Epic Fury. This is the imaginary of the movement we’re talking about. Hate doesn’t do compromise.
To understand contemporary reactionary formations, you argue that scholars need to move from thinking about violence as instrumental to violence as infrastructure. Why is this change in focus necessary for studying and countering far-right violence?
That’s a more complex point that would require a deeper engagement with the article. But let’s start by thinking about the relationship between the far right and infrastructure. In a broad sense we can say that infrastructure is a set of material assemblages which provide the support for stuff to work, to keep on functioning. Is it a coincidence that so many far right talking points refer to infrastructure? Gender neutral toilets? Colonial railways? Crowded airports? War on motorists? 15-minute cities? ULEZ conspiracies? I think not. Infrastructures are also lessons! They teach us how to see and behave in the world and are therefore a fundamental part of the fantasies we live by. Gender segregated toilets naturalise segregation, literally cementing an ideological construct in space. Looking at the relationship between reactionary violence and infrastructure might help us see the links between the mainstream and the extreme, sadly obscured by academic analyses invested in unhelpful fantasies. To keep in the metaphor I used in the article, it helps us broaden our intellectual focus away from the rioting clowns towards the wider populist circus which enabled and empowered them.
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Dr Henrique Tavares Furtado is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UWE. He writes on the memory of authoritarianism in Latin America and reactionary ontologies in Political Theory and International Relations. He is the author of Politics of Impunity: Torture, the Armed Forces and the Failure of Transitional Justice in Brazil (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and numerous articles in the journals Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology, Review of International Studies, Critical Security Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Critical Military Studies, The Journal for the Study of Radicalism and others.
Alex Yates (he/him) is a doctoral researcher at the University of Bath. His research focuses on anti-populism in the UK, US and EU contexts. He has published in The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Politics, Political Studies Review, European Journal of Political Research and JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies.
Henrique and Alex are members of the RPRN
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