Far-right Digital Activism: Transnational Connections and Memory in Southeast Europe 

The terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011 and New Zealand and Halle in 2019 have demonstrated that far-right extremists worldwide utilise the memory of the Yugoslav Wars for their online mobilisation. The far-right and populist »illiberal memory« (Rosenfeld 2021) remains an underexplored area within memory studies (Levi and Rothberg 2018). This project seeks to address this gap by focusing on far-right memory activism in southeastern Europe and its transnational connections beyond the region. 

A transnational far-right movement, fueled by social media and the global rise of populism, constructs an alternative narrative of the Yugoslav Wars as an exemplary case of a »clash of civilizations« (Huntington 1993), which serves to promote Islamophobia and frame the »new liberal world order« as a threat. This memory is propagated through the creation and sharing of memes that circulate transnationally, mainly in fringe imageboards like 4Chan. To unveil the processes of memetic transformation, imitation, iconisation and narrativisation, the project employs the concept of »traveling memory« (Erll 2011) alongside multimodal discourse analysis. An initial exploratory study focusing on the Remove Kebab and Pepe the Frog memes (Ristić 2024) has already demonstrated the potential of this research design.