This article interrogates the paradoxes and structural incapacities of state-led responses to far-right extremism in Aotearoa New Zealand. It draws on 28 in-depth semi-structured interviews with public servants, platform insiders, and anti-fascist organisers. It foregrounds how in the efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism online, contemporary national security governance is increasingly mediated through technocratic rationalities and delegated to corporate actors whose interests are embedded in capitalist regimes of accumulation. Participants from regulatory and enforcement bodies articulate a growing disjuncture between policy ambition and institutional capability, marked by conflicting mandates, constrained resources, and the outsourcing of harm mitigation to the private sector. Rather than enhancing state capacity to response to contemporary online vectors of extremism, these arrangements reproduce neoliberal security logics that depoliticise violence, obscure its structural roots, and disproportionately expose racialised communities to surveillance and targeted hostility. This article argues that efforts to police extremism online are shaped by, and complicit in, the reproduction of racial capitalist orders in digital form. These dynamics carry profound implications for national security praxis, democratic accountability, social cohesion and the future legitimacy of public power.
Angus Lindsay (Sat,) studied this question.