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Paper short abstract

This paper shows how far-right mobilisation often grows not from ideology but from everyday practices of self-discipline, masculinity, and shame. Drawing on ethnography with Traditionalists in London, it argues that grievance is lived through bodies, routines, and intimate struggles for control.

Paper long abstract

Public debates about the far-right often focus on leaders, slogans, and ideological texts. While important, this emphasis can obscure the more intimate processes through which far-right politics takes hold. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with self-identified Traditionalists in London, this paper argues that far-right mobilisation is sustained not primarily through doctrine, but through everyday practices of self-making, bodily discipline, and emotional struggle.

I show how engagements with gym culture, self-optimisation, productivity discourse, and online masculinity spaces formed key pathways into extremist politics. For my interlocutors, feelings of failure, shame, and loss of status were not simply background conditions but active sites of political formation. Discourses of purity, control, and strength linked personal dissatisfaction to narratives of national decline, allowing individual weakness to be reframed as collective injury. The body became a proxy for the nation, and self-discipline a form of political discipline.

Rather than understanding radicalisation as a sudden ideological conversion, this paper traces how grievance is gradually cultivated through routines, habits, and affective attachments. I argue that far-right imaginaries function as a form of emotional governance, offering redemption and belonging through harsh regimes of self-surveillance and purification. Crucially, I show that these worldviews are not only violent towards others but operate as profoundly self-harming mechanisms. While promising strength and restoration, they intensify cycles of shame, anxiety, and unattainable ideals.