27 October 2025
Bilbao Campus
The University of Deusto will host the international conference “Radical Right Narratives, Conspiracy Theories & Vigilantism in the Age of Democratic Decline” on 27 and 28 October. In a context of growing polarisation and disinformation, the event will turn the Bilbao campus into a space for debate on the future of democracy. Researchers from European and American universities will reflect on the rise of far-right discourse, the spread of conspiracy theories, and their impact on the quality of democratic systems.
Over the last decade, democracies have faced multiple challenges: authoritarian tendencies, political polarisation and misinformation have transformed public life and civic engagement. Radical movements, through exclusionary narratives and conspiratorial views, have undermined trust in institutions and justified practices of self-defence and political violence, both online and offline.
The conference, coordinated by Bilge Yabanci and Sonia Alonso Sáenz de Oger (University of Deusto) together with Erol Saglam (University College London & Istanbul Medeniyet University), will address these phenomena from an interdisciplinary perspective. Academics in Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication and related fields will examine how these narratives spread, intertwine with alternative views of reality, and give rise to control and exclusion practices that undermine citizens’ trust in institutions.
Fear and voting
The programme will include panels on current issues, such as the influence of fear of crime on voting for the far right, and the re-emergence in Europe of civilian patrols and groups that normalise violence, legitimised by political and media discourse. The phenomenon of “aggrieved anti-heroism” will also be discussed, represented by figures such as Elon Musk or Andrew Tate, who channel male discontent linked to misogynistic and anti-democratic online communities.
The conference will also examine the spread of conspiracy theories through social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, confirmed by large-scale surveys in Turkey, which fuel polarisation and scepticism towards scientific evidence. There will be a focus on the use of memes and digital identities as tools for activism and parody, as well as discussion of the professional sector combating disinformation, which is currently targeted by populist campaigns accusing it of censoring public debate.
The event will feature academics from a total of seventeen universities, including Oxford, Bath, Stockholm, University College London, University College Dublin, Boğaziçi and Lisbon, alongside researchers from the University of Deusto and its Faculty of Social and Human Sciences. Deusto’s participation underlines its commitment to knowledge transfer, internationalisation, and research on democracy in a context of political change and setbacks in rights.
The conference forms part of the EARS research line “Political and Social Transformation” and is linked to La Caixa’s REACH project (2025–2027) on radical right-wing narratives in Spain and Portugal, coordinated by Bilge Yabanci, a researcher at Deusto and Ikerbasque. Find out more about the project.
