MEN4DEM will systematically advance our understanding of how political masculinities are constructed and mobilized by the extreme right in Europe. We will develop an evidence-based alternative paradigm to prevent and counter the growth of anti-democratic masculinities. In constant co-creation with young men and societal and artistic partners, we will develop and test interventions to promote models of democratic masculinity. Our interventions will include concrete tools for policy-makers, practitioners, civil society groups and political parties to de-normalize gender-based exclusion.
Contact: Liza Mügge
Towards a new democratic paradigm
One contribution of the project will be the development of a theoretical framework. Co-created with innovative methods from theater and the arts, we will build on both academic and practical experiences to develop a joint understanding of what anti-democratic masculinities are and what more inclusive, democratic masculinities could be. The framework will guide the project and it will be tailored to the different users: academics and social actors. It will provide the conceptual, methodological and normative foundation for our research activities. It will be revisited as research findings and practical interventions emerge over the course of the project. In its final version, it will be presented as a paradigm that synthesizes and incorporates findings and experiences, and that can be used by others.
Contact: Elin Bjarnegård
‘we will build on both academic and practical experiences'
Socialization into (anti)democratic masculinities
To study socialization into political masculinity roles, the project will collect new survey data in Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. It will collect data on democratic values, political participation, nationalism, gender role attitudes, male toughness, sexual diversity and views towards women in political roles. Socialization also increasingly takes place online, where it will be studied with the use of web tracking data that links individual information diets to political attitudes. A particular focus will be on the antifeminist and misogynistic ‘manosphere’, where we will also use qualitative methods such as netnography to understand how extremist content is disseminated and how new participants are attracted to extremist communities.
Contact: Vera Lomazzi
Spillover to mainstream politics
We know that ideals of anti-democratic and violent masculinities spill over to the mainstream political sphere. The project will focus on political party youth wings to shed light on how this happens among young, politically engaged men. Youth wings operate both online and offline, and hybrid ethnography – focusing on multiple field sites, including physical, digital and digital-physical - will be used to capture these intertwined activities in Greece, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. Influencers constitute another politically important group in the spread of extremist ideas. Their politicization of gender and their content production, discursive strategies and interaction with followers will be analyzed by scraping social media data and closely following a selected number of influencers.
Contact: Brit Anlar
Political leaders and AI-driven charisma
The integration of (anti)democratic masculine ideals into political leadership is also important for understanding how these ideals are cemented into the party apparatus but also deployed to attract new supporters. Analysis of parliamentary speeches and social media posts by extreme-right leaders will be used to create a typology of extreme-right leadership styles. As online and offline spaces are intertwined and leaders increasingly transfer the jargon, communication style and practices of the online space into parliamentary/official language in a selective way, the project will map the effects of AI-driven amplification of extremist content.
Contact: Theoni Stathopoulou
Developing alternative perspectives on being a man in the 21st century
Interventions for more democratic masculinities
Together with our societal and artistic partners, we will develop a series of artistic interventions that will be tested to ultimately result in an effective intervention model. There will be two kinds of interventions: short online videos, aimed at fostering resistance to techniques of manipulation used by antidemocratic groups, and theater-based workshops, used to shape more democratic and inclusive versions of masculinity. The videos build on previous research on mental vaccination against misinformation and will seek to inoculate viewers against the techniques often used by anti-democratic movements to recruit new followers. It will target vulnerable, at-risk for extremist recruitment groups of young men, and there will be treatment and control groups in order to estimate efficiency. The theater-based workshops will aim to shape more democratic masculinities. Target-groups will also be co-creators: de-radicalized men and boys who have left radicalized communities; bystanders (friends, family members and professionals around extremist boys and men); and men belonging to demographic risk groups for radicalization. Performances will be discussed and evaluated by the participants. The interventions will be informed by other strands of research, and will develop alternative perspectives on being a man in the 21st century that can be deployed to prevent boys and men from entering extremist groups in the first place, and help them to leave.
Contact: Tomasz Besta