The Politics of Exclusion: Far-right, Religion, and Minority Rights amid Democratic Backsliding

The rise of far-right populist parties across liberal democracies is reshaping minority rights. Ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities have increasingly become targets of far-right movements that depict them as threats to national identity. Far-right exclusionary politics operates not only through overtly anti-minority narratives but also through the selective reinterpretation of religious and civilizational frames that redefine the boundaries of national belonging and political citizenship.
This panel investigates how far-right actors mobilize, appropriate, and reinterpret religious identities to depict minorities as threats and legitimize the erosion of minority rights in Europe and beyond. Rather than considering religion as a secondary factor, it treats it as a key symbolic resource through which far-right movements construct religiously inflected conceptions of national identity, define the boundaries of political communities, and justify exclusionary measures affecting minority groups.
The panel examines the institutional settings that mediate the politics of exclusion, as well as the role of societal actors, particularly religious authorities and organizations, in sustaining or contesting such politics. Minority rights erosion is thus conceived not simply as the result of the electoral success of far-right parties, but as an incremental and politically driven process in which religiously inflected exclusionary claims acquire legitimacy and increasingly become embedded in institutional practices and policies.
Proposed topics include, among others:
• How do far-right parties mobilize, appropriate, and reinterpret religious narratives to redefine and restrict minority rights?
• Which institutional conditions favour or constrain the translation of exclusionary claims into policies affecting minority rights?
• How do religious authorities and organizations align with or resist exclusionary narratives promoted by far-right actors on minority issues?
• How do minority groups contest and respond to exclusionary politics under far-right governments?
The panel welcomes theoretically informed and empirically grounded contributions using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods approaches. It encourages cross-national comparisons and in-depth single-case studies across European and non-European contexts. By bringing together research on far-right politics, religion, and minority rights, it aims to advance understanding of how exclusionary politics is constructed, legitimized, contested, and institutionalized. This perspective sheds light on the normative conflicts, institutional processes, and political struggles involving minority groups amid democratic backsliding.