Vem äger berättelsen? Om legitimitetsanspråk i en statsnära extremismrapport och i ett alternativmedialt motnarrativ

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how radical nationalism and the alt-right are constructed as extremism and as a (potential) security threat in a state-adjacent expert document—the CATS/FHS report From the Nordic Resistance Movement to the Alt-Right, and how this framing is contested in an alternative-media counter-narrative. The analysis uses Daniel C. Hallin’s sphere model as its main lens, complemented by securitization theory, Carl Schmitt, Gaetano Mosca, Jacques Ellul, and scholarship on counterpublics, to investigate how legitimacy boundaries are produced and challenged in a mediated public sphere. Methodologically, the study is an exploratory case study based on qualitative document and text analysis of a strategically delimited corpus, key framing sections of the report (preface/summary and selected chapters) and Karl-Olov Arnstberg’s blog post Politiserad forskning. The findings indicate that the report positions democracy as a protected referent object and shifts the issue from ordinary political disagreement toward a risk-oriented governance horizon through a process logic (normalization–radicalization–violence), spectrum and association-based reasoning, and value thresholds that demarcate legitimate controversy from deviance. The counter-narrative responds by challenging the report’s epistemic authority (source hierarchies, politicization, guilt by association), reframing the conflict from threat to legitimate opposition, and advancing a narrower boundary rule in which violence is treated as the decisive threshold for extremism. Overall, the case highlights a struggle over interpretive authority: not only what counts as extremism, but who is entitled to draw the boundary between what should be debated and what should be managed.