This book initiates a critical discussion on the varieties of global anti-fascism and explores the cultural, political and practical articulations of anti-fascism around the world. This volume brings together a group of leading scholars on the history of anti-fascism to provide a comprehensive analysis of anti-fascism from a transnational and global perspective and to reveal the abundance and complexity of anti-fascist ideas, movements and practices. Through a number of interlinked case studies, they examine how different forms of global anti-fascisms were embedded in various national and local contexts during the interwar period and investigate the interrelations between local articulations and the global movement. Contributions also explore the actions and impact of African, Asian, Latin American, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern anti-fascist voices that have often been ignored or rendered peripheral in international histories of anti-fascism. Aimed at a postgraduate student audience, this book will be useful for modules on the extreme right, political history, political thought, political ideologies, political parties, social movements, political regimes, global politics, world history and sociology. Chapters 5 and 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Argentine women’s long resistance to extreme rightists, tyranny, and militarism culminated in the Junta de la Victoria, or Victory Board, a group that organized in the aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in defiance of the neutralist and Axis-leaning government in Argentina. A sewing and knitting group that provided garments and supplies for the Allied armies in World War II, the Junta de la Victoria was a politically minded association that mobilized women in the fight against fascism. Without explicitly characterizing itself as feminist, the organization promoted women’s political rights and visibility and attracted forty-five thousand members. The Junta ushered diverse constituencies of Argentine women into political involvement in an unprecedented experiment in pluralism, coalition-building, and political struggle. Sandra McGee Deutsch uses this internationally minded but local group to examine larger questions surrounding the global conflict between democracy and fascism.

Social movement scholarship has been dominated, until recently, by work on progressive movements. Yet as far-right agendas, narratives, and actors increasingly occupy public space, it is important to recognize, make visible, and understand the important role of grassroots far-right mobilization in facilitating this rise. This book showcases recent scholarship on mobilization for and against the far-right in Europe and the USA, fills in gaps in empirical knowledge on right-wing mobilization, and serves as a means through which to test the robustness of existing social movement theory. Rich case studies covering mobilizing and countermobilizing in Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Turkey, Tunisia, the UK, and the USA offer novel insights into this understudied area of political contention. Contributors follow a diverse range of approaches and lines of inquiry, meaning that readers will come away not only with a better picture of the dynamics of right-wing mobilization but also with a robust understanding of key areas of social movement scholarship. This book will be of interest to anyone wanting to better understand the rise of far-right movements, their role in contemporary contentious politics, and grassroots efforts to contest them. The chapters in this book were originally published in Social Movement Studies.

The increasing radicalization of political life in most countries in Europe lends special relevance to studies of the antifascist legacies on the continent. This insightful collection of essays is an in-depth review of antifascism in Slovenia, setting it in the context of related movements elsewhere in Europe. The period treated by the 19 essays comprises the interwar period, World War Two, and the post-war decades. The comparative and transnational perspectives advanced by the volume change our understanding of antifascism. The essays deal with the right-wing but also left-wing instrumentalization of antifascism, with a particular focus on the communist and post-communist periods. The authors point out that antifascism comes in various strains, whether inspired by liberalism, social democracy, communism, monarchism, anarchism, or even Christian conservatism. The contributors bring to light several overlooked antifascist actors, campaigns, and organisations, mostly in Slovenia and the Adriatic area.

Since the election of President Trump and the rise in racist and white supremacist activity, the militant antifascist movement known as antifa has become increasingly active and high profile in the United States. This book analyzes the tactics, culture, and practices of the movement through a combination of social movement studies and critical criminological perspectives. Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews with activists, this book is the first scholarly sociological analysis of contemporary antifascist activism in the United States. Drawing on social movement studies, subculture studies and critical criminology, it explains antifa's membership, their ideology, strategy, tactics and use of culture as a weapon against the far right. It provides the most detailed account of this movement and also cuts through much of the mythology and common misunderstandings about it. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in sociology, political science, anthropology, criminology, and history; however, a general audience would also be interested in the explanation of what drives antifa tactics and strategy in light of the high-profile conflicts between fascists and antifascists.

Anti-Fascism and Ethnic Minorities explores how, and to what extent, fascist ultranationalism elicited an anti-fascist response among ethnic minority communities in Eastern and Central Europe. The edited volume analyses how identities related to class, ethnicity, gender and political ideologies were negotiated within and between minorities through confrontations with domestic and international fascism. By developing and expanding the study of Jewish anti-fascism and resistance to other minority responses, the book opens the field of anti-fascism studies for a broader comparative approach. The volume is thematically located in Central and Eastern Europe, cutting right across the continent from Finland in the North to Albania in the Southeast. The case studies in the fourteen research chapters are divided into five thematic sections, dealing with the issues of 1) minorities in borderlands and cross-border antifascism, 2) minorities navigating the ideological squeeze between communism and fascism, 3) the role of intellectuals in the defence of minority rights, 4) the anti-fascist resistance against fascist and Nazi occupation during World War II, as well as 5) the conflictual role ascribed to ethnicity in post-war memory politics and commemorations. The editors describe their intersectional approach to the analysis of ethnicity as a crucial category of analysis with regard to anti-fascist histories and memories. The book offers scholars and students valuable historical and comparative perspectives on minority studies, Jewish studies, borderland studies, and memory studies. It will appeal to those with an interest in the history of race and racism, fascism and anti-fascism, and Central and Eastern Europe.

This volume investigates the ambition of the Red International of Labour Unions to radicalize the global waterfront during the interwar period. The main vehicle was the International Propaganda Committee of Transport Workers, replaced in 1930 by the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers as well as their agitation and propaganda centres, the International Harbour Bureaus and the International Seamen’s Clubs. The book scrutinizes their solidarity campaigns in support of local and national strikes as well as on their agitation against discrimination, segregation and racism within the unions, their demands to organize non-white maritime transport workers, and their calls for engagement in anti-fascist, anti-war and anti-imperialist actions.

What is fascism? Is it an anomaly in the history of modern Europe? Or its culmination? In Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism, Michael Ortiz makes the case that fascism should be understood, in part, as an imperial phenomenon. He contends that the Age of Appeasement (1935-1939) was not a titanic clash between rival socio-political systems (fascism and democracy), but rather an imperial contest between satisfied and unsatisfied empires. Historians have long debated the extent to which Western imperialisms served as ideological and intellectual precursors to European fascisms. To date, this scholarship has largely employed an “inside-out” methodology that examines the imperial discourses that pushed fascist regimes outward, into Africa, Asia, and the Americas. While effective, such approaches tend to ignore the ways in which these places and their inhabitants understood European fascisms. Addressing this imbalance, Anti-Colonialism adopts an “outside-in” approach that analyses fascist expansion from the perspective of Indian anti-colonialists such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose, and Mohandas Gandhi. Seen from India, the crises of Interwar fascism-the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Spanish Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, Munich Agreement, and the outbreak of the Second World War-were yet another eruption of imperial expansion analogous (although not identical) to the Scramble for Africa and the Treaty of Versailles. Whether fascist, democratic, or imperialist, Europe's great powers collectively negotiated the fate of smaller nations.

The first comprehensive history of an Italian revolutionary group that fought fascism in interwar Europe and pursued a liberal socialist project beyond it This Italian antifascist revolutionary group "Giustizia e Libertà" operated both in emigration and as part of the clandestine resistance, offering radical responses to the rise of Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism. How to understand and fight fascism? How to rethink politics in the maelstrom of crisis that shook Italian and European society in the 1930s? How to design a new post-fascist order out of the ruins of the Great War? To answer these questions "Giustizia e Libertà," founded by Carlo Rosselli in Paris in 1929 and disbanded in 1940, developed several revolutionary projects and linked socialist and liberal traditions in innovative ways, inspired by French and European culture. Their debates focused on fascism as a product of a post-1914 civilizational crisis and a key political, social, cultural phenomenon of the interwar period. To struggle against its enemy, the group aimed to go beyond the Marxist notion of class and to assert different concepts of nation and Europe, while elaborating lucid comparative thoughts on tyrannies.

Elisabeth "Ilse" Seger was the wife of Gerhart Heinrich Seger, a German Social Democratic member of the Reichstag from 1930 to 1933. He was reelected for the last time on March 5, 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power. A week later, the Nazis arrested him and held him in "protective custody" for three months in a local prison in Dessau and then sent him to Oranienburg concentration camp for six months, until he escaped to Czechoslovakia. In The Memoir of Ilse Seger, Ilse tells Gerhart's story, but more importantly, she tells her own story: of her early resistance to the Nazi regime as a political opponent herself; of her solidarity with the Jews during the early years of Nazi persecution; of her defiance of expectations for women at the time; of her time as a hostage alongside her daughter, Renate, in Rosslau concentration camp and how they got out with help from members of Parliament; and, lastly, of her first years living in exile in France and Switzerland as her husband went on an anti-fascist speaking tour in the US. Ilse's story is an incredible contribution to our understanding of gendered political resistance, life in early German concentration camps, and Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, by showing what everyday life was like for the wife of a political opponent in Nazi Germany. The Memoir of Ilse Seger is a gripping narrative of adventure and intrigue about the wartime life of an ordinary, decent woman.