ARENAS partner, University of Helsinki, recently hosted the 2025 Aleksanteri Conference. This year’s conference theme was Extremisms: Ambiguities, Ideologies, Agency, and featured presentations from several members of the ARENAS Consortium. The conference brought together researchers to discuss and present the latest research on countering extremism, how authoritarian societies label minorities as extremists, far-right extremism, information warfare, and academic freedom
Conference organiser Katalin Miklóssy (University of Helsinki) leads Work Package 6 on Ethics Norms and Politically Sensitive Science for ARENAS. She participated in a panel discussion on “Knowledge Production in Crisis: Constraints on Academic Freedom in Finland, Hungary, and Poland” and in two roundtables, Roundtable 2C-1: “The nexus of illiberalism and migration in today´s Russia, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe”, and Roundtable 3B-1: “Discussion of Linda J. Cook Welfare Nationalism in Europe and Russia: The Politics of Exclusionary and Inclusionary International Migrations”.
Other members of the ARENAS consortium who spoke at the conference were Louise Burté from CNRS-CREM- University of Lorraine, who gave a presentation titled, “Is this a Fair Story?: Using alternative narratives to remediate extremist attitudes with a young audience” Gwenaëlle Bauvois from the University of Helsinki, delivered a presentation titled “Closing the Policy Gap: Feminist Security Frameworks to counter radical far right mobilisation”. Later, ARENAS member Ana Yara Postigo Fuentes from Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf spoke on the topic of “From Structure to Circulation: a Framework for the Analysis of Extremist Narratives.”
It was wonderful for ARENAS to have our work presented at this prestigious conference and to share our research with so many other experts in this field.