The ARENAS consortium focuses on the narratives as crucial nexuses, because “the battle of stories, not the debate on issues” can determine the way in which citizens react to political events. Looking at extremist narratives in the European political and social context invites us to cross-reference questions of discourse and ‘semiotisation’ of social reality with the positioning of these narratives, and/or stories, which can be defined as ‘extremist’.

Extremist narratives constitute counter-narratives in the sense that they challenge mainstream worldviews and mainstream interpretations of periods of social change and major events. While extremist narratives are strongly ideological, they tend to represent mainstream worldviews as distorted by ideology. They claim to represent truth, whereas they often depict mainstream views as drawing on doxa or a conspiracy preventing the expression of truth. Thus, a strong antagonism is constructed between extremist and mainstream narratives, which is evident if we compare the narratives on the on-going war in Ukraine.

The ARENAS project considers the effectiveness of extremist narratives as fundamentally discursive, and seeks to characterise the linguistic, and more broadly, the semiotic dimension of this phenomenon, to provide concrete recommendations about their detection, characterisation, and prevention.