Why We Need a New Framework to Study the Far Right in the Global South

Vast scholarship has attempted to account for the rise – or resurgence – of the far right in the post-2010 world. In this short article, we argue that we need a new approach to understanding such a phenomenon, relying on a Global South perspective1, in which colonialism and coloniality play a central analytical role (Masood and Nisar, 2020; Tavares Furtado and Eklundh, 2022). In the international literature, countries in the Global South are often presented as examples, case studies or variants of wider political events that place the United States and Europe at the center of their analysis. The problem of this colonized academic mindset is that countries like Brazil and the Philippines have experienced – and reinvented – one of the most radical and violent expressions of authoritarianism in the world. The profound damage caused by the Jair Bolsonaro administration on the environment is immeasurable but receives only residual international academic and journalistic attention, which hinders a better understanding of the most ferocious impacts that extremists have on the world.