As part of STAIR's Special Issue on the radical Right and Fascism, I spoke with Kyle Allen about World of the Right. We talked about how World of the Right fits into my previous work, the relevance of the book, and many other issues.

You have published extensively on African politics and security, alongside issues related to private security actors in international politics. More recently, you have written on far-right politics and co-authored the newly released World of the Right with Cambridge University Press. What brough you towards studying the global Right?

The journey from African politics and security to the global Right is not as long or unlikely as it might seem. I’ve always been interested in how ideas travel and in the intersection of the local and the global. My first book Disciplining Democracy, for example, looked at how the ideas and practices of multi-party democracy were exported and imposed on African countries, and much of my other work also deals with the relationship between the local and the global. In other words, one of the things that intrigued me about the rise of the radical Right, apart from its obvious importance for democracy and world politics, was how these ideas spread, where they came from, and how they could find footholds in seemingly very different locations and among very different populations.

More directly, World of the Right began in lunch-time conversations with my colleague and partner Michael Williams. Listening to the news, we began to notice how the rise of various right-wing populist movements was presented almost exclusively as a series of distinct nationalist movements, and very few picked up on their interest in foreign policy and their international networks. This was back in 2015, early 2016, before the first Trump Presidency and before Brexit, and together with other colleagues at the University of Ottawa and at Queen Mary, University of London we decided to apply for a research grant which was actually already then called World of the Right. What was great about this research team was that we all brought different strengths to the project, and the book reflects that breath of expertise. I should perhaps also add that Africa is not without significance or relevance to the radical Right, and in the book, we trace some of the alliances between African actors and the radical Right in other parts of the world.

In both “World of the Right” and an earlier co-authored article in International Political Sociology, you have referred to the idea of an ‘international political sociology’ held by the New Right. Why is it analytically useful to describe the international thought of the Right in such terms?‍

You can read the full interview here