Extremist timelines: interrogating the politics of time in twenty-first-century violent anti-liberal movements

Abstract This article seeks to enrich understanding of Amitav Acharya's formulation of the multiplex world order in two novel ways. First, it recentres violent extremist actors as being among the architects of such multiplexity and, second, it highlights their contribution to multiplexity's temporal pluralism. The article makes a theoretical contribution in conceptualizing temporalities as a defining feature of the multiplex's complexity and diversity; a methodological contribution in conceptualizing timelines as a framework to study the temporal element of extremist politics; and an empirical contribution through an original and comparative reading of the fictions, manifestos and newsletters of Islamic State and a selection of white power terrorists. The reading focuses on three elements: crisis discourse, accelerationist logic and millenarian visions. As meta-narratives of world political time, extremist timelines not only shed light on the world-views of their purveyors but also the phenomenological quality of their politics. Besides enriching and endangering its diversity and complexity, these radical timelines also historicize the multiplex as emergent within a collective mood of alienation, apocalyptic urgency and crisis.