Think & Drink Kolloquium des Georg-Simmel-Zentrum, Raum 002, Universitätsstraße 3b in Berlin
03. November 2025, 18 Uhr
In the current surge of authoritarian and far-right mobilisations, spatial dynamics play a crucial role – from urban-rural divides to contestations around nationhood and globalisation. Existing analyses framed around rechte Räume (‘right-wing spaces’) or rechte Raumnahme (‘far-right spatial appropriation’) fall short of capturing these dynamics, however, as they tend to conceptualise space as a bounded container subject to far-right control.
To move towards a more nuanced understanding, this talk introduces the notion of ‘far-right territorialisation’, as developed in the collaboratively authored book Das Ende rechter Räume (Autor*innenkollektiv Terra-R 2025). We argue that territorialisation practices by far-right actors intertwine with the imaginative and discursive territorialisation in relation to the far-right. This dual process of territorialisation, we demonstrate, can productively be analysed through its performative, affective, imaginative, and infrastructural dimensions. In doing so, we seek to move towards a more complex reading of formations such as the perceived split between privileged liberal urban centres and ‘abandoned’ rural regions allegedly ceded to far-right forces – not as fixed divisions, but as contested, multifaceted co-constructions.