Intellectual and Organizational Structures and Their Implications for the Arab World
Policy Paper by Mohamed Masharqa — Progress Center for Policies
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Executive Summary
In recent decades, the global arena has witnessed a notable rise of extremist nationalist and religious right-wing currents across Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Asia, and Brazil. These currents exploit religion and nationalism as primary instruments to influence society and the state. They are distinguished by sophisticated ideological and organizational architectures that enable mass mobilization, deep societal penetration, and influence—sometimes control—over state institutions, with a clear capacity to shape national and international policy.
This paper shows that these movements do not evolve in isolation from the Arab context; rather, they interact with it through global media, identity narratives, and shifts in public mood—creating openings for the emergence of hybrid local nationalist–religious movements influenced by global currents. The paper also discusses the phenomenon of “Trumpism” in the United States as an American variant of the global nationalist right, and highlights its spillover effects on Arab societies, including the reproduction of identity closure narratives and pressures on fragile political and social structures.
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Analysis
Ideological Foundations
At the intellectual level, extremist right-wing movements rely on absolute national or religious belonging, treating national or religious identity as superior to any human-rights or democratic considerations. This ideology is built on dividing society into a binary “us/them,” portraying minorities, migrants, or liberal elites as a threat. According to a Carnegie Middle East Center report (2021), such narratives are increasingly influential in politically weak Arab states, where they may amplify receptiveness to “defending identity” discourse—either via existing hardline groups or through the emergence of new hybrid nationalist movements.
These movements also exploit economic and social crises to deepen polarization and legitimize their political projects. In the Arab world—where many states face unemployment, rising poverty, and weak institutions—researchers at Al Jazeera Centre for Studies (2022) note that economic crises make youth more receptive to nationalist or religious discourses offering symbolic “solutions” tied to identity and social stability, thereby increasing the risk of local expansion of global extremist movements or those inspired by experiences such as Trumpism.
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Class Realignments and the Re-Definition of Left and Right
On the class dimension, nationalist and religious right-wing organizations have undergone major transformations in their social bases, challenging traditional assumptions that associated the right with upper and bourgeois classes and the left with workers and the poor. These organizations have expanded to include poorer groups, segments of the working class, and parts of a declining middle class—benefiting from feelings of economic and social vulnerability, withdrawal from the traditional state, and perceived deprivation of symbolic and social justice. According to a Harvard University Middle East Program report (2022), this shift enables right-wing currents to present a dual discourse combining nationalist or religious identity with symbolic justice—reinforcing feelings of belonging and agency among grassroots constituencies.
This class-based mobilization pattern is not confined to the West; it has direct implications for the Arab world. Vulnerable social segments—particularly youth and economically exhausted middle classes—face parallel pressures: unemployment, declining public services, and blocked channels of political participation. Brookings Institution studies (2021) observe that such conditions make these groups more susceptible to extremist nationalist or religious narratives, whether promoted by local organizations or influenced by external currents such as Western right-wing populism.
In this context, right-wing organizations convert social and economic tension into a mobilization tool by creating shared enemies—religious or cultural minorities, migrants, or liberal elites—producing a sense of value and empowerment for marginalized groups. National or religious belonging thus becomes a means to reconstruct collective identity, with the potential to transfer these ideological and organizational models into other settings. New nationalist or religious movements may form that adopt the same approach: mobilizing grassroots support and exploiting economic, social, and political crises to achieve political leverage.
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The United States
White nationalist and extremist religious movements—such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters—offer a clear example of how such organizations combine organized popular mobilization with rapid movement through digital and social platforms (e.g., Twitter, Parler, Telegram), alongside ideological and field training for cadres (Beauchamp, 2021; Southern Poverty Law Center, 2022). These groups use a binary “us versus them” discourse targeting migrants, minorities, and political opponents, while strengthening members’ sense of national identity and belonging.
Events such as the January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol demonstrated their ability to convert digital mobilization into impactful on-the-ground action, and to influence official institutions and local policies in electorally competitive states.
These experiences provide critical lessons on how populist discourse and national or religious identity are used to spotlight presumed external threats—cultural or political—intensifying “self/other” narratives and feeding social withdrawal and defensive entrenchment. They also illustrate how digital platforms function as a dual-use tool: for ideological and political recruitment and the dissemination of ideology, while enabling exploitation of local economic and political crises to justify heightened identity defense.
The Impact of Trumpism
Trumpism constitutes a clear model of interaction between nationalist populist discourse and flexible political organization, with reciprocal influence extending to Europe, Latin America, and even the Arab world. This model demonstrates how similar strategies can be borrowed to reshape internal narratives and steer public mood toward defending identity against external influence, as noted by the Middle East Center for Security Studies (2023).
Its mechanisms of mobilization include control over digital and social media, cultural and religious events, investment in education and youth camps, and penetration of state institutions through party or association channels.
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Europe
Europe offers diverse models of nationalist and populist right-wing movements that combine political and societal organization, providing a useful reference for assessing potential impacts on the Arab world.
In France, for example, the former National Front (Front National) played a prominent role in political and social mobilization through local activist networks and training programs designed to strengthen organizational and electoral capacities, with a focus on anti-immigration and identity-preservation discourse (Centre for European Policy Studies, 2021). The party also organized public demonstrations and marches—such as the 2022 Paris protests against liberal immigration policies—enhancing its ability to shape public opinion and steer political debate.
In Germany, parties such as Alternative for Germany (AfD) demonstrated a high capacity to exploit economic and social crises to reinforce the “us/them” binary, targeting migrants and religious minorities. A European Studies Institute report (2020) notes that the party combined a centralized structure with the engagement of local networks of social, cultural, and religious organizations to strengthen loyalty and belonging. This illustrates how European right-wing organizations can deploy digital media and public meetings as tools of mobilization and recruitment—an instructive model for Arab contexts characterized by institutional weakness and comparable social fragility.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz applied a model merging nationalism and religion to reinforce traditional culture, while using state instruments and laws to restrict independent NGOs and direct education and media toward a unified nationalist narrative (Freedom House, 2022). This approach shows how European right-wing movements integrate legal–institutional structures with societal mobilization to consolidate long-term influence.
Collectively, these European cases show the right’s capacity to merge an ideological structure centered on national identity and traditional culture with an organizational structure that includes grassroots networks, political parties, and digital media tools—while exploiting social and economic crises to strengthen messaging.
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Brazil and Latin America
Over the past decade, nationalist and religious right-wing currents have risen rapidly, organizing broad popular networks linking conservative religious discourse, national identity, and political interests. In Brazil, the “Coalition for Brazil” and Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL) played a pivotal role in the 2022 presidential elections through digital popular mobilization, social media leverage, and public events promoting family values and Christianity as the foundation of national identity (Hunter, 2022; Folha de São Paulo, 2022). These organizations also used a mix of civic and religious education and youth camps to train cadres in ideological messaging and field mobilization.
Across Latin America, researchers at Columbia University’s Latin American Studies Center (2023) note that these movements exploited corruption crises, economic deterioration, and distrust in traditional institutions to advance conservative nationalist and religious narratives, reshaping the traditional right’s base to include collapsed middle-class segments and the poor who feel culturally and socially threatened. These shifts produced hybrid mobilization models combining grassroots social activism with an official political façade, increasing these movements’ ability to penetrate state institutions and influence public policy.
The Brazil/Latin America experience offers a concrete model of how nationalist and religious right-wing organizations exploit economic and social crises to broaden popular support, form a dual discourse merging national identity and religion, and enhance loyalty. Such a model can inspire local movements or signal the risks of transferring modern organizational strategies to global contexts—especially in regions marked by state fragility, economic crises, and blocked political participation. A Carnegie Middle East Center report (2022) notes that such models are used to disseminate “identity defense” narratives, increasing receptiveness to populist and extremist religious discourse.
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South and East Asia
Several Asian cases illustrate extremist nationalist and religious movements that combine identity-based ideology with robust societal and political organization—making them important for evaluating possible spillovers into Arab contexts.
In India, the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) represents an advanced model of integration between social and political work. It relies on a centralized network linking religious and cultural associations and youth training camps with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the political vehicle for implementing nationalist policy (Jaffrelot, 2021). This model rests on broad grassroots mobilization and the consolidation of influence through media and civil society, offering insight into how mass-organization strategies can transfer to Arab settings—particularly where institutional fragility and social division persist.
In Japan, nationalist currents emphasizing protection of traditional identity and values have appeared through far-right groups calling for reinforcement of traditional culture and nationalist education (Stockwin, 2020). These movements often rely on educational networks and cultural institutions to entrench national loyalty, with relatively limited reliance on political parties compared to India. Nevertheless, the strength of cultural mobilization demonstrates the potential transferability of identity-based discourse as a tool of symbolic and social control.
In Thailand, royalist nationalist movements played a major role in popular mobilization—especially in broad demonstrations supporting the monarchy in 2023—using schools and cultural events to reinforce national and religious loyalty (McCargo, 2023). These movements combine societal and cultural activism with political pressure, while political parties play a limited role, illustrating how nationalist and religious currents in Asia can shape public opinion and steer debate outside formal institutions.
Further, cases in Pakistan and Bangladesh show how religious-nationalist groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami and Islami Andolan Bangladesh mobilized politically and socially by leveraging religious discourse to reinforce national belonging and community loyalty, with direct influence on local policies (Rashid, 2020). This indicates that the use of religion and culture to strengthen nationalism is not unique to India or Thailand; it reflects a broader regional dynamic in Asia that may intersect ideologically and organizationally with Arab movements seeking to reshape national and religious identities.
These Asian experiences therefore help explain how nationalist and religious currents build interconnected organizational structures that combine identity-based ideology with societal and political networks, and sustained mobilization via education and cultural and religious occasions—making systematic study of these models essential for designing policies capable of confronting cross-border effects (Jaffrelot, 2021; McCargo, 2023; Stockwin, 2020).
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Israel
In Israel, the political landscape has seen a marked rise in nationalist and religious currents spanning formal political parties, semi-clandestine organizations, and settler popular activity in the occupied Palestinian territories. Among the most prominent are the extremist settler wing within Likud, Otzma Yehudit led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich’s religious-nationalist current, alongside organizations such as Im Tirtzu and “Price Tag.”
These currents rely on a religious-national ideology that treats the historic “Land of Israel” as an absolute property of the Jewish people, merging religion with national identity as the basis of political legitimacy.
They exhibit hostility toward any peaceful settlement with the Palestinian people, viewing negotiations or territorial concessions as a threat to national and religious existence. In this context, they often reject core democratic principles such as equality among citizens and the Palestinian right to self-determination, and promote policies of discrimination and domination in public life—including legislation restricting Palestinian rights in occupied areas. For example, settler protests in June 2023 against any political settlement tracks demonstrated these groups’ readiness to use force and public mobilization to preserve their interests and encourage their constituencies to reject territorial concessions.
These organizations employ multiple tools to influence society and the state, including digital media campaigns, religious education, direct settlement activity, and party fronts that penetrate state institutions to shape policy according to their interests. This reflects an organized strategy of intellectual, social, and political dominance—transforming nationalist and religious loyalty into a hegemonic political force that blocks progress toward a comprehensive peaceful settlement with Palestinians, as noted by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in its recent reports (2022–2023).
Accordingly, these movements are not merely local social or political actors; they pose a threat to democratic stability within Israel, complicate the settlement trajectory with Palestinians, and indirectly affect regional interactions with the Arab world by reinforcing political deadlock and hindering the pursuit of just and comprehensive solutions.
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Effects of Western Nationalist and Religious Rightward Shifts on the Arab World
The rise of nationalist and populist right-wing currents in the West—across Europe, the United States, and Latin America—has directly and indirectly impacted Arab contexts. Western populist nationalist discourse, centered on protecting national identity and local culture, weakened the appeal of globalization narratives and liberal humanitarian solidarity, opening space for exporting binary “us/them” narratives into Arab societies.
These narratives strengthened perceptions of civilizational threat and “endangered identity,” making societies more vulnerable to “identity defense” discourse—an environment conducive to the emergence of extremist nationalist movements or hardline religious groups. Western tightening against migrants and minorities, and the escalation of inward-looking discourse, provide a practical model that resonates in the Arab region, where institutional weakness and blocked participation channels lead many to perceive cultural and religious identity as under threat. This increases attraction to nationalist or religious narratives that prioritize local loyalty over global values or multiculturalism.
For example, Carnegie Middle East Center studies (2022) found that Arab youth in crisis zones such as Iraq and Syria become more receptive to nationalist populist discourse when it coincides with state failure to provide economic, political, and social security.
Moreover, the rise of Western right-wing nationalism has contributed to hybrid extremist models that may inspire local Arab movements—combining culturally specific nationalist discourse with modern organizational strategies relying on digital media, popular events, and civic and religious education. These dynamics point to a broader crisis in traditional political representation in the Arab region, and demonstrate modern right-wing organizations’ ability to integrate economic, cultural, and religious dimensions into a coherent political message—making them a plausible influence on Arab political and social landscapes, as emphasized by Carnegie Middle East Center reporting (2022) on populist movements and their regional implications.
This interaction suggests that Arab extremism can no longer be understood solely as a product of internal crises, but also as part of a reciprocal global wave in which organizational and ideological experiences circulate between the West and the Arab world—also noted by Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies (2023).
Finally, understanding these effects becomes necessary for designing comprehensive Arab policies across education, media, and culture—rebuilding trust in the state, strengthening citizenship, and preventing extremist movements from exploiting social and political vacuums. Any political or security approach that ignores these global interactions will remain limited in effectiveness and may deepen social polarization and threatened-identity dynamics in the region.
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Conclusion and Key Findings
• The study’s findings show that nationalist and religious right-wing currents, despite differences in historical and political contexts and variation in social environments, converge around shared ideological and organizational structures that enable steady expansion within society and subsequent penetration of the state and its institutions. Comparative cases demonstrate that these movements build their political projects around redefining national and religious identity as an absolute reference point, organizing around it a value and political system that justifies exclusionary policies and grants leaders enduring legitimacy—especially during periods of crisis and collective anxiety.
• The ideological foundations of these currents make national or religious belonging the cornerstone of defining citizenship and political engagement, retooling religion, cultural heritage, and collective symbols as instruments for legitimizing discourse and practice. Economic and social crises and geopolitical shifts are converted into rhetorical resources that mobilize collective sentiment and produce internal cohesion, enabling movements to transcend traditional divisions and widen popular support.
• Organizationally, these movements increasingly adopt a composite bottom-up model: beginning with the social base through civil associations, religious schools, cultural initiatives, and local media, and then gradually moving toward more formal party and political fronts. Grassroots constituencies are linked to central leadership through a flexible hierarchical network that can shape public opinion and steer political decisions via channels that appear—on the surface—social and “natural.”
• In parallel, these currents employ multi-level mobilization and control strategies. Digital media is pivotal in producing meaning and reshaping grand narratives; nationalist and religious events renew belonging and loyalty to leadership; and quiet penetration of state institutions occurs through party, union, or association fronts—converting societal influence into direct political power.
• Comparative experiences also show that many of these organizations combine models: long-term grassroots social work alongside an official political façade that engages the state, law, and institutions. Ideology thus transfers gradually from society to the state through integrated structures, making separation between partisan society and governance institutions increasingly difficult over time.
• The cross-border dimension cannot be ignored: these currents develop within global networks that exchange organizational expertise, electoral campaign techniques, and digital influence tools, benefiting from mutual successes that strengthen grassroots confidence in their political model—transforming them into an interconnected international system rather than isolated local phenomena.
• Overall, the study concludes that these organizations represent a complex political–organizational model that blends deep societal mobilization with formal party structuring, is nourished by crises and international transformations, and relies on the legitimacy of nationalist and religious identity as a pillar of authority.
• Understanding the nature of this model and its internal mechanisms is a necessary condition for designing effective counter-policies—nationally and internationally—that do not stop at superficial security or legal measures, but rather address the social and intellectual environment that enables these currents to reproduce themselves and expand their influence over time.
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