This lecture discusses changes in the U.S. national strategy to prevent and counter extremist violence, including an embrace of public health style approaches to prevention. Dr. Miller-Idriss also reviews recent trends in U.S. political and hate-fueled violence and shares an emerging evidence base about the effectiveness of two core interventions: short form “prebunking” videos and community-based capacity building with parents, caregivers, youth mentors, faith leaders, mental health professionals, and educators. She also highlights key areas of transatlantic dialogue and cooperation about promising practices in each country.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss is an award-winning author and scholar of extremism and radicalization. She is the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at the American University in Washington, DC, where she is also a Professor in the School of Public Affairs and in the School of Education. Dr. Miller-Idriss regularly testifies before the U.S. Congress or briefs policy, security, education and intelligence agencies in the U.S., the United Nations, and other countries on trends in domestic violent extremism and strategies for prevention and disengagement. She serves on the international advisory board of the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) in Oslo, Norway and is a member of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)’s Tracking Hate and Extremism Advisory Committee.

This GlobeLecture was organized with Oliver Decker and the Else-Frenkel-Brunswik-Institute for Democracy in Saxony

Recorded on 3 November 2023

You can find the video recording of the lecture here

Renewed political concern about geographical inequalities in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 is raising questions about the ability of the prevalent pre-crisis model of development to generate more spatially balanced and inclusive economic development. This lecture provides the first assessment of this emergent post-2008 spatial policy in relation to the interaction of three key processes: neoliberalism; the rise of state capitalism; and, populism and the geography of discontent. Danny MacKinnon will discuss how the interactions between these three factors have shaped spatial policy in Europe and North America since 2008. This will be based on three main forms of spatial policy: metropolitanisation strategies to support the growth of large city-regions; the extension of competitiveness policies to smaller cities and towns; and, place-based industrial policies. MacKinnon argues that while these new spatial and industrial policies are focusing attention on ‘left behind places’ and rejecting elements of globalism and neoliberalism, they have not as yet dislodged the underlying emphasis on growth and competitiveness.

Danny MacKinnon is Professor of Regional Development & Governance and Director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at Newcastle University. He is a leading economic geographer with a long-standing interest in the institutions and politics of urban and regional development. He is a Fellow of the Regional Studies Association, the Royal Geographical Society and the Academy of Social Sciences. His recent work has focused on the creation of new regional growth paths and the development of spatial policies to address regional inequalities. He is currently leading an international research project on patterns of demographic and socio-economic change in ‘left behind places’ in the UK, Germany and France.

The GlobeLecture is a series of lectures held several times a semester in which outstanding researchers discuss global change, transnational interdependencies and regional transformations. It is organised by the Leipzig Research Centre Global Dynamics in cooperation with partners inside and outside Leipzig University. This time, together with the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, we welcome the geographer Danny MacKinnon, Professor of Regional Development and Governance at Newcastle University.

The 20th century making of South Africa is a history of the conflict among multiple nationalisms, fuelled by rapacious racial capitalism. British imperialism, as nationalism writ large, provoked the rise of two contenders in the early 1910s: African nationalism and Afrikaner nationalism. Afrikaner nationalism imposed its vision of a purified volk, the ethnic and racial lynchpin of the updated set of colonial technologies called apartheid, which extended to the level of the subject. In contrast to apartheid stood the growing idea of an ever-more inclusive nation, ethnically and racially, particularly in the politics of the African National Congress. The end of official apartheid and the advent of constitutional democracy in 1994 unhinged Afrikaner whiteness. Applying the concept of ordentlikheid (respectability) in relation to gender, the paper probes what is left of ‘the Afrikaner’ and its intersectional production of external and internal others. Afrikaner nationalism is considered in its reduced, postapartheid enclaving mode. The focus is then turned to Afrikaner nationalism’s nemesis, African nationalism – in particular, the remains of race in currently resurgent populist forms.

Christi van der Westhuizen (Nelson Mandela University, South Africa), Associate Professor and Senior Researcher, is the head of the Research Programme at CANRAD. She was invited on a Visiting Professorship to Leipzig University, Germany, in 2022. As transdisciplinary scholar interested in identities, differences, ideologies and discourses with a focus on (post)apartheid South Africa, she has published widely, both academically and popularly. Prof Van der Westhuizen was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, and held research associateships with the University of KwaZulu Natal and Free State University. She previously worked as an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria.

She has served on several global initiatives, including as an expert on globalisation and gender on a project for the World Communion of Reformed Churches. Her working life started at the anti-apartheid weekly newspaper Vrye Weekblad and she worked as a Senior Political Correspondent in Parliament and as an Associate Editor for a not-for-profit global online news agency focusing on social justice.