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"Forced Migration and Political Violence" published on by Oxford University Press.

Hate crime is a pervasive problem across societies. Though perpetrators represent a small share of the population, their actions continue in part because they enjoy community support. But we know very little about this wider community of support; existing surveys do not measure whether citizens approve of hate crime. Focusing on Germany, where antiminority violence is entrenched, this paper uses original surveys to provide systematic evidence on the nature and impacts of hate crime support. Employing direct and indirect measures, I find that significant shares of the population support antirefugee hate crime and that the profile of supporters is broad, going much beyond common perpetrator types. I next use a candidate choice experiment to show that this support has disturbing political consequences: among radical right voters, hate crime supporters prefer candidates who endorse using gun violence against refugees. I conclude that a significant number of citizens empower potential perpetrators from the bottom–up and further legitimize hate crime from the top–down by championing violence-promoting political elites.

This country report uses three exemplary 'hotspots' of radicalisation to examine the factors at the micro, meso and macro levels that have fostered extremist violence in Germany over the past 30 years: the National Socialist Underground (NSU), the antirefugee Freital Group and the synagogue shooting in Halle. Thus, it covers the gradual diversification among right-wing perpetrators, from the long-term development of the clandestine terrorist network NSU and its massive supportive network to the rapid radicalisation visible in the open commitment to violence against refugees. It further turns to the return of attacks committed by individual far-right perpetrators since 2016, whose radicalisation is closely linked to online-communities. All three cases illustrate that right-wing extremist ideology, especially hatred against minorities, is the primary motivational factor for violence. They are also united by the feeling of extreme marginalization and lack of representation by politics, which they use to justify their acts. At the same time, differences between the groups can be seen in terms of their political agenda. While the members of the NSU and the Halle shooter refer to abstract enemy stereotypes to justify their violent acts, the Freital group pursues political goals, with which they exert pressure on the state authoritarians and partly find political representation through parties like the AfD. In addition, the report identifies various factors that facilitated the terrorist attacks and critically discusses the role and failures of security authorities.

This article examines a recent refugee novel, Jenny Erpenbeck's Gehen, ging, gegangen (Go, Went, Gone, 2015) in relation to debates on the refugees who have arrived in contemporary Germany in the context of the so-called "refugee crisis." The article's point of departure is Go, Went, Gone's rare pairing of GDR history and refugees – a pairing that deviates from usual discussions of former East Germany and distressed migration today. Such discussions tend to see the GDR as a source of present-day antirefugee sentiments and violence (which are higher in former East German federal states) because of the communist state's alleged racial homogeneity and geographic isolation. Disputing both assumptions, the article points to Erpenbeck's diachronic juxtaposition of refugees in contemporary Germany with the GDR's relations to its partner countries in the global South, which the novel portrays in their ethical ambivalence. While the former GDR sought to position itself as part of an egalitarian transversal network of countries that emerged from the decolonization of Africa (including Angola, Ghana, Kenya, and Mozambique), as well as Cuba and Vietnam, the communist state also entertained various educational and economic exchanges with these partner countries (from 1970s onwards) that were often marred by colonial discourses of development and modernization, economic exploitation, and racialized oppression against participants in these programs. Turning to the novel, the article analyzes Erpenbeck's paratactic juxtaposition of the now-"strayed" (abhandengekommen) utopian architecture at Berlin's Alexanderplatz with a present-day image of striking refugees as an allegory of the largely unrealized, egalitarian potential of the GDR for contemporary discussions about refugees in reunified Germany. By opening up the failed utopian promise of the communist future that never arrived so as to include those who have been historically excluded from the imagined community of East Germany, the novel suggests that demonstrating solidarity with refugees in contemporary Germany might redefine East German socialist legacy, making it applicable for the 21st century.