Date of Submission

5-15-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Political Science

Advisor

Robert A. Sanders, LP.D., J.D., LLM

Keywords

Recruitment, Extremism, Far-right, Right-wing, Radical right, United States Government

LCSH

White supremacy movements--United States, Terrorism--United States--Prevention, Right-wing extremists--United States, Radicalization, Critical criminology, Radicals

Abstract

For approximately the past twenty years, the United States (US) government has focused on combating terrorist threats from abroad like Islamic terrorism. However, in recent years, terrorism has transitioned from an external threat to an internal threat. Some people in the US only realized how large a threat white supremacy terror poses to the nation’s security following the insurrection in the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Despite this newly gained knowledge, the threat of white supremacy terror in the US has been growing for years. This study looked at the ways foreign governments have combatted white supremacist terrorism, recruitment, and radicalization methods. Quantitative analysis was performed to assess whether those same tactics would effectively lower the number of attacks related to white supremacy terrorism within the US by combatting recruitment and radicalization efforts. There was insufficient data available to identify correlation between the number of white supremacy-related attacks and the nations’ efforts to prevent attacks and address white supremacy. Overall, many of the methods used by the nations in this paper would not be legal in the US due to violations of the First Amendment. This showed two things. First, there is a major gap in research and data collection and second, there needs to be legislative reform in the US.

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