Divya Rao presents her research on religious imaginaries in extreme-right online discourse.
This lecture introduces a case study examining the instrumentalisation of India’s Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) ideology within Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik’s 2011 manifesto. The central argument is that Breivik’s engagement with Hindutva reflects an early recognition of digital platforms as sites for ideological extraction, translation, and far-right alignment. Drawing on various sources, Breivik selectively appropriated Hindutva narratives of civilisational decline, cultural victimhood, anti-Muslim sentiment, and resistance to liberal universalism. Removed from their historical and political contexts, these narratives were recombined to legitimise a European far-right imaginary and acts of direct political violence. The manifesto is therefore analysed not as an isolated document, but as part of a wider ecology of digitally networked extremism.
Methodologically, the study combines critical discourse analysis with digital humanities approaches attentive to circulation, sourcing, and mediation. The manifesto is treated more than simply an ideological text, and as a digitally assembled artefact shaped by online infrastructures and transnational circuits of knowledge production. By tracing hyperlinks, citations, and archival references embedded in the manifesto, the thesis reconstructs how extremist knowledge is assembled and distributed in digital environments. Platform analysis situates the manifesto within early online spaces (blogs, forums, Facebook, archival sites) that function as extractive infrastructures, enabling diffuse ideological material from the Global South to be selectively mined, decontextualised, and redeployed. While grounded in these early digital ecosystems, the analysis also opens space for considering how similar processes may now be accelerated or automated within contemporary algorithmic systems and emerging AI-mediated political landscapes. The thesis further argues that networked digital technologies reshape ideological conflict across three interrelated dimensions: spatial, ethical, and temporal.
Spatially, digital platforms collapse geographic distance, allowing Hindutva narratives to circulate not as context-specific political projects rooted in Indian history, but as portable ideological resources embedded within selective Global North political imaginaries. This produces a transnational ideological space in which North-South distinctions are strategically blurred, erased, or instrumentalised. Ethically, the thesis examines how digital mediation reshapes moral vocabularies central to political conflict. Emancipatory and decolonial logics that were originally articulated to challenge domination, imperialism, or structural violence are now hollowed out and redeployed within exclusionary, hierarchical frameworks. Platform affordances that prioritise attention, circulation, and affect over contextual depth allow ethical claims such as ‘resistance’, ‘self-defence’, or ‘cultural survival’ to be reframed as justifications for ethno-nationalist and racialised violence.
Temporally, networked technologies disrupt traditional linear understandings of ideological development and conflict discourse. The manifesto draws simultaneously on medieval civilisational myths, postcolonial grievances, and future-oriented visions of demographic threat, assembling them into a compressed—if not flattened—temporal sphere. Digital architectures render history as modular, enabling selective uses of the past to legitimise future violence and sustain anticipatory forms of conflict. By situating Breivik’s manifesto within this broader trajectory of digitally mediated extremism, the seminar invites further contemplation and discussion on how evolving digital infrastructures continue to shape political conflict, ethical frameworks, and future imaginaries.
Speaker Bio:
Divya Rao has a cross-disciplinary background in Business Management, Literary Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies (UiT). She works at the intersection of digital humanities, transnational political extremism, and conflict transformation. Her thesis examines the appropriation of Indian Hindu nationalism within Anders Breivik’s 2011 manifesto, analysing what this transnational convergence reveals about the limits of dominant peace and conflict paradigms. Hoping to pursue a PhD, her current research interests focus on the mobilisation of transnational far-right currents in the restructuring of global ethical discourses, particularly the tactical co-optation of emancipatory and decolonial logics. She has previously worked as a youth programme facilitator at the Indian Social Institute, Bangalore, and managed a small hospitality business for 11 years. She is a member of the ENCODE research group and can be reached at: rdivyarao@proton.me