The Historical Origins of the Contemporary European Radical Right

The Radical Right seems to be everywhere in Europe. Qurans are burned in Denmark and Sweden, Italy has a prime minister with a background in neo-fascism, and Hungary’s prime minister warns against the death of the “old” West as Muslims take over. One way of understanding all this is to look at the historical origins of the European Radical Right, which is what Mark Sedgwick, Aarhus University professor will explore in his lecture.

As well as revisiting the Radical Right’s distant origins in the French Revolution and the rise and fall of fascism in the first half of the twentieth century, Sedgwick will examine the lesser-known history of post-fascist thought during the second half of the twentieth century, and show how all this feeds in to the contemporary situation.

Mark Sedgwick is professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark, where he works on Islam in the West as well as in the Arab world, and on Islamophobic and Radical Right movements and ideologies. Before moving to Denmark, he taught in the History Department at AUC. He was born in London and educated at Oxford University and the University of Bergen in Norway. His most recent book is Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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