Taking Ideology Out: Finding the Diasporic Hindu Far-Right Down Under

Common understandings of what the far-right is revolve around ideological commitments to nativism, anti-democratic sentiment and authoritarianism. However, the assumption that the far-right is best comprehended through ideological positions is undermined by extensive evidence that within far-right mobilisation ideological commitment is uneven, ambiguous, and sometimes absent. In this paper, we argue that this tension presents a fundamental obstacle for the study of the global far-right. We propose instead that ideology must be analytically decentred in the study of the far-right in favour of a materialist study of far-right networks. Such an approach draws our attention to the vast non-ideologically committed apparatuses required to sustain an ideologically committed core at the centre of far-right networks. Using an archival social network analysis tools, we examine the case of the Australian branch of the transnational Hindu far-right, and show that even organisations that do not demonstrate far-right ideological commitment can be key vectors for the production of far-right legitimacy, the movement of far-right funding, and the advancement of far-right agendas. Accordingly, these ideologically tepid organisations are crucial elements of far-right networks, demonstrating that ideology is an unreliable tool to assess the material expansion and mechanisms of far-right networks.