Problematising ‘Right-wing Extremism’: Analysing White Supremacy and Government Responses to Racist Violence

In June this year, two attacks took place in Oulu, Finland. The first involved the stabbing of a 12-year-old boy of immigrant background by an adult man with known connections to the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM). A few days later, an adult man, also of immigrant background, was stabbed by a 15-year-old boy in what was suspected to be a ‘copycat’ action of the first attack. This was the first high-profile act of white supremacist violence since the new right-wing/far-right government was elected in 2023, and several of the government ministers made statements in response. Several government ministers problematised these attacks, and, in this paper, I problematise their responses.

On the day of the attack, Deputy Prime Minister Rikka Purra of the far-right Finns Party¹ tweeted²: ‘With street crime, gangs, etc., we are unfortunately following the same trend as in other countries. The government is working, but it is horrible what it is already like in this country!’. The next day, after police confirmed that the attacker had a neo-Nazi background, Purra (sort of) corrected herself, tweeting: ‘Extremism, drugs, robberies, gangs – the problems are growing. We must take the deterioration in security seriously, increase penalties and stop shying away from the violence of all kinds’. Minister of the Interior Mari Rantanen, also of the Finns Party, tweeted: ‘Violence in general is totally unacceptable, but violence against children is inexcusable. Not to mention the horror that the motive apparently comes from extremism’.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Petteri Orpo of the right-wing National Coalition Party (NCP) tweeted: ‘Far-right violence is a real threat in Finland. There is no room for extremism of any kind in this country. The government is determined to combat extremism and violence’. The same day, Orpo was also interviewed by the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat, where he said: ‘This must be taken very seriously. Also, extreme movements on the left. All extremism is reprehensible’.

We can identify three main ways government ministers problematised the first Oulu attack: first, as a problem of ‘street crime and gangs’, second, as a problem of ‘deterioration of security’, and third, as a problem of ‘extremism’.

The issue of ‘street crime and gangs’ has been a hot topic in the Finnish parliament in recent years, and frequent debates have taken place on the subject. Members of parliament from both the NCP and the Finns Party have been keen to connect the problem of ‘street crime and gangs’ with what they see as a ‘failed immigration policy’ and a ‘lack of integration’ by immigrants. The solutions proposed have usually defaulted to ‘limiting immigration’ and ‘increasing deportations’. Given Purra’s political agenda as leader of the anti-immigration Finns Party, it is not hard to see why she would have a political incentive to assume the attack was related to ‘street crime’ and ‘gangs’ before the identity of the attacker had been revealed.

Furthermore, by assuming the attack was associated with ‘street crime and gangs’ – and therefore, by implication, someone with an immigrant background – Purra was perpetuating a long-standing pattern by people in power of associating non-white people with violence. The media plays a central role in representing violence as a problem of non-white people, and this is not the first time an attack has been wrongly attributed to a non-white person. A good example is from 2011, when, after the massacre in Norway by a white supremacist, the Wall Street Journal went to press before his identity had been revealed, publishing an editorial in which it was assumed the attacker was a Muslim who had targeted Norway because it was a ‘liberal democracy committed to all the freedoms that define the West’ (Kundnani, 2012: 1). When a perpetrator is non-white, this is often highlighted in media coverage. The sexual abuse of minors scandal of 2018, also in Oulu, for example, was widely reported in Finnish media, with articles often emphasising the foreign background of the perpetrators.

Purra’s theory about ‘street crime and gangs’ did not last long because the police revealed that the perpetrator had a background in the neo-Nazi NRM. Her follow-up tweet is also interesting, though. Instead of retracting her mistake, Purra doubled down – arguing that this attack was just one aspect of a broader ‘deterioration in security’ faced by Finland, which includes ‘extremism’, ‘drugs’, ‘robberies’ and again, ‘gangs’. Now, this problem representation is significant because Purra takes a racist attack, connects it to other unrelated crimes to create a broader ‘deterioration of security’ narrative – to which one of the solutions is limiting immigration – and therefore manages to both condemn the attack and, at the same time, fuel a narrative which advocates the same political objectives as the attacker.

What we represent the problem to be determines what the possible solution is. If we represent this attack as a ‘deterioration of security’, then this invites securitising solutions, which is exactly what happened. In a press conference following the attack, Mari Rantanen announced her intention to expand police powers, including introducing ‘stop and search’ (YLE News, 2024). ‘Stop and search’ is a highly controversial policy which allows police to stop and search individuals in the street on often tenuous grounds. In the places where it is used, it often disproportionately targets people from ethnic minority backgrounds. In the UK, for example, black men are 3.7 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than white men (Home Office, 2024). With an almost exclusively white police force in Finland, there is good reason to suspect it might be used in a similar way here. Again, we see a racist attack problematised in a way that legitimises a racist response. The communities harmed by the attack end up being the ones who suffer most from the solution.

The third way in which the attacks were problematised was as an act of ‘extremism’. ‘Extremism’ is another popular word in political circles which has its roots in counterterrorism policy after 9/11 and is often used interchangeably with ‘terrorism’. While ‘terrorism’ usually refers to a method of political violence, ‘extremism’ refers to the ideas and ideologies that supposedly lead someone to violent action. There is very little convincing empirical evidence that violence is caused solely by people’s ideological views, and indeed, most people with ‘extreme views’ never commit violent acts. The replacement of ‘terrorism’ with ‘extremism’ means that nowadays, most governments have taken it upon themselves to prevent – not only ‘extremist’ violence – but also the ‘extreme ideas’ that supposedly lead to them. Thus, the state has moved into monitoring the ‘pre-criminal space’ in a deeply undemocratic development.

The ‘extremism’ label also depoliticises. By designating the Oulu attacker as ‘extreme’, Orpo and Rantanen invisibilised his actual politics and their racist, sexist and authoritarian character. Furthermore, this depoliticisation enabled Orpo to bring the so-called ‘extreme left’ into this discussion despite them having nothing to do with what took place. The label thus functions similarly to Purra’s invocation of ‘security’ - it is a way of connecting the Oulu attacks to something that they are not connected to. One of the key differences between the so-called ‘extreme right’ and ‘extreme left’ in Finland is that the former has historically been more prone to direct violence than the latter, who have tended to target property rather than people. The word ‘extreme’ just means a deviation from the norm, and clamping down on ‘extreme ideas’ thus narrows the window of acceptable political opinion. The ‘extremism’ label can thus be used as a tool to suppress any kind of political dissent and maintain the status quo. It is not a sufficient basis for defining a security threat (Ford & Jackson, 2023).

A few days later, on June 18, a similar attack took place, but this time, police suspected that it had what they called a ‘racist motive’, and this aspect was reflected in the responses of government ministers. Rantanen tweeted: ‘According to the police, the last stabbing was racially motivated. This has to stop’, while Orpo tweeted ‘There is no place for racism in Finland’. Purra tweeted: ‘According to initial reports, the motive is racist. This is unacceptable’, while President Alexander Stubb also waded in, tweeting: ‘I strongly condemn racism in all its forms. There must be no place for racism or racist violence in Finland’.

Because of the suspicions of the police, we see in the above tweets a unanimous tendency to problematise the attacks as an act of ‘racism’, although the degrees to which that was condemned varied. When an attack has a ‘racist motive’, it is usually considered by police in Finland to be a ‘hate crime’, which is defined as

‘crime targeted at a person, group, a person’s property, institution or a representative of these, motivated by prejudice or hostility towards the victim’s real or perceived ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation, gender identity or appearance or disability’ (Ministry of the Interior, 2020: 88).

This definition of ‘hate crime’ – that such attacks are motivated by ‘prejudice’ or ‘hostility’ on the part of the perpetrator – aligns with what Kundnani (2023) calls ‘the liberal theory of antiracism’ and Henriques (1984) calls ‘cognitivism’. Within this theory, racism is conceived of as an individual problem of irrationally held beliefs and prejudices. Since racism is a product of individual attitudes, the implied anti-racist solution is to change people’s attitudes – by challenging unconscious biases, reducing micro-aggressions, better representing diverse identities and educating people out of individual prejudices (Kundnani, 2023). According to the liberal theory of racism, it is also an outdated mindset – a ‘remnant of past historical racial situations’ (Bonilla-Silva, 1997, p. 468) – and, although some individuals still hold racist views, racism at the societal level is generally seen to have been defeated by liberal democracy. This is the commonsense understanding of racism in today’s liberal, Western societies – and it is the same understanding of racism that Orpo and Stubb invoke when they say, ‘there is no place for racism in Finland’.

However, there is a different understanding of racism, which has its roots in the thinking of decolonial and abolitionist scholars, many of whom came from the Global South. This understanding sees racism as an economic and political structure that privileges whites over non-whites in almost every area of life. As Charles Mills writes,

‘racism (or, as I will argue, global white supremacy) is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties’ (Mills, 2022, p. 3).

Mill’s definition is useful in highlighting the relationship between white supremacy and capitalism by emphasising the differential distribution of socioeconomic privilege and material wealth. Within this understanding, racism or white supremacy can no longer be seen as a relic from the past. It is the fact that if you order a Yango or Wolt delivery, you will likely be served by a brown or black person – people working precarious, low-paid jobs in the ‘gig economy’; that Finnish Somalis were more vulnerable to catching COVID because they were more likely to work in customer-facing roles such as bus drivers, cleaners and nurses; that the materials in our phones and the clothes we wear are produced by people working in slave-like conditions in Global South countries; and that American and German arms companies are currently making millions from the genocide of Palestinians. These are some of the more commonplace examples of a white supremacist structure that has organised the world for centuries and continues to do so today.

Prejudiced, racist attitudes are, of course, still a part of this problem, but crucially, they are just one part. Global white supremacy is a far bigger structure – a political and economic system that transcends national borders and shapes most of the world. Problematising it this way implies a need for much bigger solutions than simply educating people out of their prejudiced attitudes. It means completely restructuring – or indeed dismantling – those economic and political systems that maintain the supremacy of whites over non-whites.

So, how do we connect this to the Oulu attacks? Structural white supremacy can be ignored if you are white and live somewhere like Finland, where you are not confronted by its effects every day. The stabbing of a child in a Finnish city, on the other hand, is much less easy to ignore – and this brings us to an important concept that we have not yet problematised: ‘violence’.

The Peace Studies scholar Johan Galtung (1990) thought of violence as having three forms: ‘direct violence’, which can be attributed to an individual perpetrator; ‘structural violence’, which is built into political systems and manifests as unequal power, life chances and social injustice, and ‘cultural violence’ (sometimes called ‘symbolic violence’) which is those aspects of ideology and language which can be used to justify direct or structural violence. Galtung (1990: 291) argued that cultural violence makes ‘direct and structural violence look and feel right – or at least not wrong’. Applying Galtung’s framework to white supremacy, we can situate the Oulu attacks as an act of direct white supremacist violence. This kind of violence can be attributed to an individual perpetrator, is often shocking and overt, and is generally condemned by politicians – as was the case in their tweets following the attacks. But this act of direct violence is just one dimension of a broader system of white supremacist violence in which the Finnish state – whose government ministers denounced the attack – is also complicit.

Structural white supremacist violence in Finland can be seen in the ‘emergency law’ on migration, which was voted through just weeks after the Oulu attacks and which was deemed to break European and international asylum law by human rights lawyers. But it can also be seen in the welfare budget cuts, which will disproportionately impact people with immigrant backgrounds who are more likely to be on low-income jobs and face discrimination in the job market. Cultural white supremacist violence is seen in the ideology and language used by both the Finns and NCP. Great Replacement Theory, for example, the idea that non-whites are forcibly replacing the white ‘native’ population of Europe, has been regularly invoked by ministers in parliament. So, too, has the idea that Finland’s national identity is under threat, that immigrants are treated more favourably than the majority population, and that they are ‘naturally’ prone to violence. These ideas and language, as Galtung described, make the direct violence of the Oulu attacks and the structural violence of anti-migration laws look and feel right – or at least not completely wrong. In this way, direct, structural and cultural violence are closely connected in a web of linkages and causal flows.

This ‘disconnection’ (Meier, 2024) that is made by politicians between direct white supremacist violence and the structural and cultural violences they perpetuate can be seen as an example of what Mills (2022) called white ‘epistemologies of ignorance’. Mills argued that the continuation of structural white supremacy depends on these knowledge systems, writing that:

‘white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement. And these phenomena are in no way accidental, but prescribed by the terms of the Racial Contract, which requires a certain schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity’ (Mills, 2022 p. 19).

Mills argues that white supremacy relies on racism being framed as a problem of individual attitudes or occasional acts of direct violence rather than as a political and economic system. It is these ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ that allow politicians – like Stubb and Orpo – to say that ‘there is no place for racism in Finland’ when, in fact, racism and white supremacy are everywhere in Finland and beyond it. At the border, on the street and in the parliament.

Žižek (2008) argues that structural and cultural violence are rendered invisible by direct violence because they sustain the non-violent ‘zero-level’ against which violence is measured. I would argue that white supremacy functions in a similar way. This does not mean that direct white supremacist violence is not real and terrifying, but it does provide an opportunity for the government to obscure their own role in maintaining white supremacy by denouncing ‘racism’ and ‘violence’. Suppose we let ourselves believe this is a problem of ‘deteriorating security’ and ‘extremism’. In that case, we find ourselves inviting policies – increased police powers, stop and search, anti-immigration policies and counter-extremism policies against political dissent – that increase structural and cultural white supremacist violence. This benefits none of us.

Prevailing liberal and right-wing understandings of white supremacist violence often fall short in addressing the complex roots and far-reaching consequences of this issue. To effectively combat this threat, we must move beyond these limited perspectives and adopt a more nuanced and comprehensive approach.

We must actively resist securitisation arguments. After the recent race riots in the UK, there were calls by many on the Left to label the rioters as ‘domestic terrorists’ and to ‘proscribe’ – i.e. designate certain white supremacist groups as ‘terrorists’. Such calls only serve to give more power to a counterterrorism system that is still primarily used against Muslims. Expanding the demographic of ‘domestic terrorists’ to also include white supremacists will do nothing to liberate those most impacted by the system. On a concrete level, particularly in reference to Finland, resisting securitisation arguments means resisting Rantanen’s proposed ‘stop and search’ policy.

Failing to address the underlying social and economic conditions that contribute to white supremacy reinforces ‘epistemologies of ignorance’. One of the ways to address these limited knowledge systems is to prioritise, promote and platform decolonial and abolitionist perspectives, which are often cast as less credible by the liberal theories of racism outlined in this paper. These perspectives deserve more consideration as they are grounded in the lived experience of those most impacted by racist violence. This could also entail challenging liberal ideas that racism is a thing of the past.

As we saw during Independence Day (December 6, 2023), when police violently dispersed an anti-fascist demonstration to make way for a far-right march, the authorities cannot be trusted to deal with white supremacists. We must therefore organise against them ourselves through direct action and grass-roots efforts, engaging in counterprotests, disrupting white supremacist activities, and building solidarity networks to empower our communities.

To achieve a just and equitable future, political activism must adopt a proactive anti-racist approach. This involves addressing systemic injustices such as the exploitation of migrant workers, broader economic inequality, and environmental injustices. By working to improve socio-economic conditions equitably, we can challenge and dismantle the structures that perpetuate white supremacist violence.