Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Abstract This article critically examines the neglected role of militarism and militarisation in the process of far-right mainstreaming, focusing on a psychoanalytical and linguistic analysis of war metaphors. The first part of the article illustrates the historical links between fascism and ontological militarism, understood as a set of metaphorical substitutions between war/peace, activism/insurrection and dissent/enmity which contributed to the colonisation of civilian life by the military domain. The second part explores the afterlives of the link militarism-extremism in the paradigms of informational and irregular warfare, and in particular the concept of Hybrid Warfare (HW). It compares the diffusion and circulation of HW within military doctrine and academic publications in the Global North (NATO) and Global South (Brazilian military) with the mobilisation of similar concepts in online spaces occupied by the far-right. The argument is based on a thematic analysis of blog posts published by the Brazilian defence blog defesanet between 2015–2025 (n = 161). The analysis shows how metaphorical uses of war by defesanet work as vectors for the dissemination far-right conspiratorial, antisemitic and racist tropes ranging from denunciations of a “mixed-racial deep state” to the denial of transgender children rights.
Furtado et al. (Sat,) studied this question.