Authoritarian Temptations and Right-Wing Threat Alliance

Wilhelm Heitmeyer is a noted German sociologist, educationalist, and professor of socialization at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence (IKG) at Bielefeld University, Germany. He founded the institute in 1996 and was founding director till 2013. Since then he has held a research professorship there. Professor Heitmeyer's long-term research interest is on right-wing extremism, violence, xenophobia, ethnic-cultural conflicts, social disintegration, and group-focused enmity. To this end, he has implemented numerous projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He has also been interested in violence in the Global South for several years. He advocates the theory of social disintegration, which he developed with collaborators in the 1990s to explain violence, right-wing extremism, and ethnic-cultural conflicts. This theory is also known as the "Bielefeld disintegration approach" in the social sciences. In 2003 he was, together with John Hagan,the editor of the International Handbook of Violence Research. In 2008, he founded the International Journal of Conflict and Violence, which he edited until 2014 together with Douglas Massey (Princeton), Steven Messner (Albany), James Sidanius (Harvard) and Michel Wieviorka (EHSS Paris) and edited a series of books in German which examined the state of discrimination against Jews, Muslims, non-whites, homosexuals, the homeless and other groups in 10 volumes from 2002 to 2011 (with Suhrkamp Verlag).

• Preface.- Introduction.- 1. A Step towards Social Analysis: Authoritarian National Radicalism as a threat to open society and liberal democracy.- 2. Anchor Text from 2001: “Authoritarian Capitalism, Democracy Depletion and Right-wing Populism. An Analysis of Development Trends”.- 3. Increased Ambivalence in Modernity and Various Types of Authoritarianism.- 4. Decades of Insecurity. Authoritarian Temptations have reached the open Society.- 5. Recent Developments in Authoritarian Capitalism.- 6. Social Integration and Disintegration Dynamics in Uncertain Times.- 7. Democracy Development: Emptiness and Economization of the Political.- 8. Empirical Syntheses and Developmental Trajectories.- 9. AfD: Authoritarian National Radicalism.- 10. Mechanisms: Destruction through Shifts in Normality.- 11. Differentiation and Dynamization as a Success Model of Right-Wing Threat Alliances.- 12. The Concentric Escalation Continuum.- 13. Group-Focused Enmity in the Population: Legitimations for Right-Wing Threat Alliances.- 14. The Milieu of Authoritarian National Radicalism and Legitimation Bridges to the System-Hostile Milieu.- 15. System-Hostile Milieu: Movement-Like Right-Wing Extremism with Destruction Goals.- 16. The Clandestine Right-Wing Terrorist Planning and Support Milieu.- 17. Right-Wing Terrorism: Group and Individual Perpetrators.- 18. Quality Changes of Right-Wing Threat Alliances Over Time.- 19. Futures: Uncertain Complexity.- Literature.