Future Tense: Narrative Time in Extreme Right-Wing Terrorist Manifestos

This paper shows how narrative theory can explain how and why terrorists tell stories. We use as case studies a corpus of texts produced by the perpetrators of a series of extreme right-wing terrorist attacks in Europe and North America from 2011 to 2024. The ideological significance of the manifestos has been addressed in several studies but we take a different and original approach, analysing their narrative form using narratological tools, focusing on their handling of narrative time. We conclude that the futures narrated in right-wing terrorist manifestos specifically are the core of their ideological and emotional appeal, and the texts’ handling of narrative time inscribes a distinctive vision of causality and human agency. We show that the extraordinary real-world effects of these manifestos are in part the product of a distinctive manipulation of narrative time in texts which perform the argument that the future can be willed into being by a text’s narrator. These texts do not just imagine a future: they aim to create it.