Right Worlds

The rise of radical conservative political forces seeking to transform liberal orders in accordance with reactionary ideals of tradition, authority and ethno-national civilizational solidarity has profoundly challenged prevailing assumptions about the direction of global politics. Previously dominant views about the inexorable spread of liberal democracy, economic globalization, and human rights are confronted by right-wing ideologies and movements that many assumed had been long left behind. This radical conservative – or as we also call it ‘radical right’ – resurgence has come in many forms, including the activities of individual thinkers, the rise of political parties, and pervasive effects of digital mobilization, to name but a few. In recent years, it has also been furthered by the striking growth and prominence of radical conservative think tanks seeking to shift the political discourses and policy agendas of global politics in drastically new, anti-liberal or illiberal directions. Although these trends have spurred a surge of interest in reactionary visions of international politics, the discipline of International Relations (IR) generally lacks the conceptual tools necessary for critically engaging these radical conservative forms of knowledge production. Right-wing political thought has no distinct place within the theoretical frameworks that have dominated the field of IR since the end of the Second World War, and these ideas are largely absent from the discipline’s historiography (McKay and LaRoche 2018; Drolet and Williams 2018). Similarly, there is a paucity of empirical knowledge about contemporary conservative visions of global politics, the institutions in which they are being produced, and the strategies through which they are being promoted. Right Worlds seeks to redress this situation through three interrelated objectives. First, the project seeks to explain the absence of conservative thought within IR by analysing the politics of knowledge creation that exiled such ideas to think tanks and policy organizations during the Cold War. Recovering this forgotten history will allow scholars to better understand the limitations that the field’s dominant theories place on its ability to engage critically and effectively with the contestations in knowledge production that play key roles in radical conservatism today. Second, the project analyses the historical development of a body of radical conservative IR in a para-academic constellation of research, educational, and policy-advocacy think tanks outside the academy since at least the early 1960s. While largely ignored in academic IR, the thinkers operating in this para-academic field were influential in developing and promoting ideas about world politics that need to be taken seriously as distinctively conservative forms of international theory. Finally, the project examines the emergence of a new wave of these para-academic institutions dedicated to advancing radical conservative ideas and agendas about international affairs. Focusing on institutional initiatives founded within the past decade in Europe and the United States, the project will draw on international and institutional political sociology to map the most significant of these institutions, their ideological positions and policy orientations, the strategies they adopt to advance their ideas about international affairs, the objectives they seek to achieve, and the patterns of collaboration and competition between them.