Societal Responses to Right-Wing Extremism: Antifascist Mobilisation against Golden Dawn in Greece

Abstract

ABSTRACT The literature on how democratic polities deal with right-wing extremism focuses on political and institutional actors at the expense of societal agency. This article offers a corrective by analysing antifascist mobilisation against one of the most extreme parties in Europe, Golden Dawn in Greece. It uses in-depth interviews with antifascists to sketch the developmental trajectory of Greek antifascism. It then utilises an original dataset of thousands of antifascist events to document spatial and temporal patterns of antifascist mobilisation. The article shows how antifascist mobilisation affected the developmental trajectory of the party and ultimately led to the conviction of its leadership.