Fractured and Splintered: Mapping Transatlantic Illiberal Events with Louvain

Image made by Erik Piccoli using “Collegium Intermarium” by IronDragon12 licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; “Social Network Diagram” by DarwinPeacock and licensed under CC BY 3.0. 

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An undeniable feature of the contemporary illiberal right is its capacity to foster global interaction and collaboration. By leveraging new technologies to share information, hosting conferences, and publishing texts, illiberal actors engage in various transnational forms of collective action. These actions include not only the co-construction of frames to present shared issues through a unified lens or to identify a shared enemy, but also more practical initiatives such as the creation of transnational organizations—with the European far-right Identitarian movement serving as a prime example.[1]

While there is an extensive and growing literature on the subject, one element of the global illiberal right which remains relatively under-studied is the role that conferences play in fostering transnational interconnectivity amongst illiberals. By allowing actors the opportunity to present their views through prepared speeches and to exchange their beliefs and ideas with like-minded individuals in an ideologically incubated environment, these events are unique in that they facilitate both networking and narrative-building. Therefore, this paper, by utilizing novel data collected for the express purpose of surveying these liaisons, seeks to identify the extent to which it is possible to speak of an intertwined trans-Atlantic network of illiberal right-wing events. The article continues as follows: after situating this research within the wider literature on far-right transnationalism, the data collection process and methodology are discussed, followed by a presentation of the findings. The analysis uncovers that the illiberal right’s trans-Atlantic conference ecosystem is interconnected yet multidimensionally fragmented, with clear ideological, geographic, and thematic boundaries emerging within the wider network.

Unmasking the Transnational Right: Between Retweets and Events

The transnationalization of the illiberal right is by no means a new phenomenon. International partnership building between parties and movements with global ambitions has existed since the Cold War, with anti-Communism representing a, if not at times the only, fundamental thematic throughline amongst these events.[2] Since then, these types of events have not only survived the Soviet collapse and the ascendence of liberal internationalism, but have flourished with digital technologies facilitating their ability to establish ties and mobilize diverse actors around shared concerns, such anti-LGBTQ and anti-vax positions.[3]

These technologies represent an essential medium for the spread of far-right narratives. As Ettlinger writes, they provide the “ordinary people” who populate digital spaces the opportunity to establish “significant linkages” and “carry messaging through the online ecosystem to affect political decision-making and societal discourses more generally.”[4] In practice, these liaisons are not limited to peer-to-peer interactions but also appear in their discourses via the creation of shared frames. Here, examples include the case of European far-right actors articulating a vision of a European Union grounded in ethnicity and sovereignty along with the transnational dissemination of far-right worldviews—such as the concepts of Great Replacement and white genocide.[5]

This transnational convergence is observable also in the general discussions of far-right audiences. As Vittonetto observes in his analysis of YouTube comments on the channels of the Republican Party in the United States, Vox party in Spain, and the Brothers of Italy party, an increasing “semantic similarity and issue alignment” is observable.[6] Still, the extent of these interactions appears overstated, with there being a lack of visual circulation coupled with a lack of issue transnationalization with interactions between actors on X (formally Twitter) being mostly between persons from the same country. [7]

An essential factor which incentivizes these actors to foster transnational ties is the legitimacy and normalization that such liaisons provide. As Caiani notes, the far right has become more mainstream in recent years through, among other tactics, strengthening its members’ transnational ties as they work to create shared discourses, networks, and events across borders, which serve to legitimize and amplify their ideologies within European political and social spheres.[8]

Furthermore, regarding the process of legitimization, illiberal think tanks, especially those in Hungary, have demonstrated their ability to serve as international mediators between different types of actors, be they politicians, journalists, or anonymous accounts linked to far-right movements. This status as ideological powerbrokers allows not only for them to provide an outlet for illiberal counter-narratives, but also to legitimize said narratives thanks to their affiliates’ academic credentials.[9] Governments and state-backed actors can likewise provide foreign organizations and parties legitimacy by amplifying their messages or simply appearing as a governing model to replicate.[10] Still, the extent to which these actors recognize there being any genuine benefit by forming these ties remains to be seen, with recent scholarship showcasing that, while the far-right supports transnational engagement, few actually participate in this.[11]

While a complete overview of the literature on far-right transnational politics goes beyond the scope of this piece, two points are worth noting.[12] Firstly, the process of transnationalization is multifaceted, with peer-to-peer connections, shared discursive frames, and mobilizations each supporting this assertion. Yet, as Caiani and Eren illustrate, these liaisons each ultimately produce shared identity frames, the essential feature that binds various actors together irrespective of their particular ideological origin or national character.[13] Secondly, and most importantly in the context of this article, the literature thus far has presented a comparatively small body of research on the phenomenon of far-right conferences. Few articles have sought to map the ecosystem of conferences and the predominance of American actors.[14] And even these articles either fail to present a holistic overview of the various types of conferences to ensure that the full extent of their overlap is represented, or they lack transparency as to how their data was collected and the replicability of their studies.

Data and Methods

To compensate for this gap, a new dataset was created for the express purpose of studying trans-Atlantic conferences and events using open-source information. The dataset represents a holistic overview of the transnational illiberal right’s international events collecting conferences that range from single-issue forums, such as the Natal Conference, which purports to combat the so-called global fertility crisis, to yearly summits which offer speakers the opportunity to discuss a myriad of issues, such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) or the National Conservatism conferences which, although building on their shared conservative background, cover topics ranging from religion to international relations.[15]

One could argue that applying a single ideological framework to define these events appears difficult if not impossible. Indeed, the actors who attend, speak at, and put together these events come from distinct traditions which at times clash with one another. For example, placing the distinctly racialist American Renaissance conferences in the same dataset as the Multipolar Conferences hosted by Russian ideologue Aleksandr Dugin appears arbitrary. Yet these apparent contradictions are resolved when the events are understood as not only allowing for trans-Atlantic interaction, but they each promote illiberal right-wing views. Here the term “illiberalism” builds on the definition posited by Laruelle, which views it as a “a critique of liberalism” in its various manifestations and the promotion of an alternative political vision.

This vision is based on four criteria: “a belief in the primacy of executive power and majoritarianism over and against institutional checks and balances and minority rights,” a “defense of the sovereignty of the nation-state over and against supranational institutions and international law,” the “call for a realist and transactional foreign policy in a multipolar world based on a civilizationalist interpretation advocating for the cultural homogeneity of the nation over and against multiculturalism,” along with “demands for respect for and preservation of traditional hierarchies and values over and against those of left-progressivism.”[16] In this sense, one might subscribe to an ideology that is in conflict with that of another actor within the network, but their discourses place them within the right-wing illiberal camp. This in turn permits racialists like Jared Taylor, neoconservatives such as former US Vice President Mike Pence, and anti-LGBT activists such as Brian Brown to be analyzed a part of a single illiberal universe.[17]

Data was obtained by collecting official conference speaker lists. However, some of these were not listed on the events’ official websites, or the original websites were taken down. Therefore, by using the Wayback Machine, obtaining them was possible in certain instances. When no speaker list was available, live recordings of the conferences were viewed, and the speaker’s attendance hand coded. The final dataset produced a total of 2,427 unique actors across 19 unique conferences from 2016 to 2025, listed in Table 1.

To test the extent to which these nodes in the dataset are part of a tight network defined by frequent actor overlap or are compartmentalized, the Louvain algorithm was applied.[18] Before addressing this algorithm, it is important to first define one of its key elements: modularity. Here, modularity refers to “the number of edges falling within groups minus the expected number in an equivalent network with edges placed at random,” that is to say, how well a network is divided into communities (modules) based on the density of ties (edges) within groups compared to ties between groups.[19] This is calculated using the following formula:[20]

While used primarily to calculate weighted networks—that is, networks wherein the edges are assigned a value (weight)—the formula can still be applied to detect communities in unweighted networks. The formula presents how modularity  measures the difference between actual edges and expected edges between nodes i and j summed over all pairs belonging to the same community and normalized by twice the total number of edges.

Regarding the Louvain method itself, the nodes in a given network are assigned to their own community and moved into a neighbor if it improves modularity, a process that continues until no move improves modularity. Then, these new communities that have been detected using modularity are turned into a single node, where the weight of the edges between the new nodes is equal to the total weight of the edges between their members in the original network. This process is replicated until modularity ceases to increase.[21] Adapting this formula to the study of these illiberal right-wing conferences is useful, as it permits us to unmask the extent to which actors within the network are connected but isolated, only interacting within communities of events that are thematically similar, or instead that these speakers drift from conference to conference regardless of theme, location, or ideological characteristics.

Results: A Multilayered and Fragmented Network  

To visualize these connections, an undirected, unweighted network wherein nodes share edges when the corresponding speakers attended the same event was built in Microsoft Excel. Subsequently, the file was uploaded to the network visualization software Gephi, where the modularity function, which uses the abovementioned Louvain method, was applied to detect and color-code communities. Subsequently, the ForceAtlas2 algorithm was applied to spatialize networks to illustrate how strong the ties between nodes are.[22] This is depicted in Figure 1:  

Figure 1: Undirected network of conference speakers color-coded based on communities detected using the Louvain method. FocusAtlas2 and the contraction function were applied to better spatialize the network.

N.B: Pro-Family Cluster is Purple; Continental European Cluster is Blue; American CPAC Post-2020 Cluster is Cyan; American CPAC Pre-2020 Cluster is Red; American NatCon and Natal Cluster is Orange; the Extremist Cluster is Pink; Multipolarity / Pro-Russia Cluster is Yellow; British Cluster is Green.

Source: Author’s elaboration with official speaker lists available online.

In total, eight unique communities were detected using this method, with a modularity score of 0.61. Since a score larger than 00.4 signifies that the network can be broken down into meaningful groups, then this value of 0.61 indicates that the network displays a strong community structure.[23] Even without the application of Gephi’s modularity function and by simply relying on the ForceAtlas2 algorithm, it is possible to see that certain clusters begin to appear, with three small clusters (two at the top along with one on the far right) and one large cluster towards the bottom. However, once the communities are color-coded, it is possible to distinguish that, within the larger cluster, smaller communities are present.

While the communities are similar in size, three large communities (Purple: 18.9%, Blue: 18.5%, and Cyan: 15.7%), two mid-sized communities (Red: 11%, and Orange:10.6 %), and three smaller communities (Pink: 9.5%, Yellow: 8.2%, and Green: 7.4%) partition the wider network. At closer inspection, these communities showcase geographic, ideological, and topical fissures within the illiberal network.

The largest cluster is identified as a topical community, that is to say, a grouping wherein the conferences gravitate around a shared topic. This community encapsulates speakers who attended the World Congress of Families conferences and the Budapest Demographic Summits. Due to their thematic congruence on issues relating to traditional family values, this community is identified as the pro-family cluster.[24] This inclusion of the two conferences within the same community indicates a greater ideological overlap than would be expected by taking the community’s event descriptions at face value.

This finding is made all the more striking when considering that the second-largest cluster, coded in blue, exclusively captures events hosted on continental Europe. The conferences in this community all occurred in either Hungary, Poland, Italy, Spain, or Belgium, showcasing unity not topically but geographically, as events ranged from single-issue conferences such as the Danube Geopolitical Summit (which centers on international affairs), to conservative forums with no set theme, like NatioCon and CPAC.

The following three largest communities identified each illustrate a geographic split from the rest of the network—albeit with certain caveats. Each cluster represents speakers attending events hosted in the United States, these being the CPAC, NatCon, and Natal conferences. The cyan and red clusters both capture the American CPAC events included in the dataset. At closer inspection, it is possible to observe how Louvain created two communities for events pre- and post-2020. This decision highlights an evolution within the American CPAC community pre- and post-2020, and potentially the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement of Donald Trump.

As for the orange cluster, here the American NatCon events and Natal conferences are united within a community underscoring not only the geographic unity between the two, but their ideological similarities vis-à-vis the CPAC clusters. Furthermore, the inclusion of the Natal conferences with NatCon is noteworthy, as one would likely expect them to be in the pro-family cluster due to their thematic overlap.[25]

One ideological community identified by Louvain is found in the fringes of the larger cluster and coded in pink. Within this community, we can identify fringe events set up by radical right organizations. These include the racialist American Renaissance conferences; the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) of political commentator Nick Fuentes; the Remigration Summit, an event hosted by Identitarian activist Martin Sellner discussing the concept of forceful relocating of non-European immigrants; the French Academia Cristiana and Institute Illiade events, which, respectively, are organized by the integralist Catholic right and French New Right; along with the Pan-Europa Conference and Awakening Conference—two events hosted by organizations which advocate neo-Nazi and neo-Fascist beliefs.[26]

The other cluster that shares minimal connections with the others is that of the multipolarity / pro-Russian community. Coded in yellow, here the conferences captured include the multipolarity conferences hosted by Aleksandr Dugin and the Future Forum 2050 event organized by Russian media mogul Konstantin Malofeev. Both the Louvain algorithm and ForceAtlas2 function illustrate how isolated the pro-Russian ecosystem is, from not only from the more mainstream events but also from the fringe cluster, underscoring how pro-Russian and multipolar perspectives are, at least within the surveyed conferences, in the minority.

While there is an observable split between the cluster of events that promote racialist, Identitarian, and neo-Fascist beliefs and the French cluster, which appears at the right of the pink cluster, they are not only connected by the Remigration Summit, indicating this conference and its agenda as a point of ideological convergence, but the algorithm recognizes them as part of the same community. Furthermore, the ForceAtlas2 setting provides a visual separation of this cluster from the overlapping clusters identified towards the bottom, supporting the assertion that these events are uniquely fringe when compared to the other events in the network. Ultimately, this shows us that, while speakers who attend these events are also invited to more mainstream venues, the fringe events that were included in the database are part of a single separate cluster, indicating that these figures remain, for the moment, sidelined from the wider debates held on the more mainstream illiberal right.[27] 

Finally, the last community, coded in green, represents the British cluster. The NatCon London conference and Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conferences appear together, united by the fact that both are hosted in the United Kingdom. Furthermore, while marketing itself as an “international movement,” the ARC is closely tied to British conservatism as its CEO, Baroness Philippa Stroud, is a Conservative member of the House of Lords and has received £1 million from the British hedge fund manager.[28]

Conclusion and Discussion

As the illiberal right expands its reach globally, it is necessary for scholars to empirically test the strength, reach, and nature of these liaisons. As this article has demonstrated, by leveraging the Louvain algorithm to uncover the community structure of illiberal conference networks, it is possible to identify geographic, ideological, and topical sub-communities.

Regarding the ideological fissures, events hosted by fringe groups such as the American Renaissance and Institute Illiade conferences are disconnected from the mainstream cluster but are still a part of the same radical community. This fundamentally illustrates that, while connected to the mainstream, these speakers on the whole, and consequently their perspectives, remain isolated from general debates taking place in the rest of society.

Within the large cluster of speakers, the Louvain algorithm reveals that the network is divided not solely by geography or conference type, but by an interplay of both. While distinct continental European and British communities are identifiable, a thematic cluster (the pro-family community) illustrates that geography is not the only structuring force as ideology and unifying themes also subdivide the network. Moreover, the American events form their own clusters, separate from those in Europe, yet a noticeable split emerges between pre- and post-2020 CPAC gatherings as well as between the NatCon and Natal conferences, underscoring internal ideological divisions. These findings suggest that, despite the availability of online participation, travel constraints continue to shape the transnationalization of the illiberal right, producing discernible regional fissures. In short, the trans-Atlantic illiberal right conference ecosystem is interconnected yet highly compartmentalized.

This paper does come with certain limitations. Although Louvain is a strong algorithm, it is not infallible: it produces only non-overlapping communities, even though in practice speakers can bridge multiple communities. Therefore, it is important to keep in mind that not all the nodes that are part of a community are exclusively tied to that cluster, and indeed, they can transcend boundaries. These figures should be devoted more attention due to their ability to act as ideological or regional powerbrokers. Furthermore, this database is not exhaustive. There is a plethora of events, both big and small, that make up this ecosystem, making it virtually impossible to map all interactions—especially since these events often do not provide readily available speaker lists. However, this article does capture a large and temporally significant set of events and speakers.

These limitations provide future avenues for research. One area which is totally absent from this article is that of discourses—that is: what speakers talk about and how they frame issues. Here it will be possible to uncover certain ideological or topical convergences which might remain hidden by simply mapping peer-to-peer liaisons. Furthermore, as alluded to previously, attention should be directed towards those who bridge communities. Certain clusters have speakers who bridge between one or more communities, thus presenting their views in multiple environments.

Future studies should address why certain actors hold this privileged position and how they leverage it. Finally, one of the major contributions that this paper offers is that is demonstrates a discernable split between the CPAC events in the United States after 2020. A greater degree of focus should be directed to the MAGA movement’s development as manifested in who speaks at which events.

Appendix

Table 1: List of conferences, their location, and timeline.

Conference	Location	Timeline
Conservative Political Action Conference	Hungary, US, Poland	2016–2025
National Conservatism Conference	US, Italy, UK, Belgium	2019–2025
Budapest Demographic Summit	Hungary	2017, 2019, 2021, 2023
Intermarium Conference	Poland	2021
VIVA Conference	Spain	2022, 2024, 2025
Italian Conservative Conference	Italy	2023
Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference	UK	2023, 2025
Natal Conference	US	2023, 2025
American Renaissance Conference	US	2016–2024
Institute Illiade Conference	France	2016–2025
Academia Christiana Conference	France	2018, 2022, 2023
Reimmigration Summit	Italy	2025
America First Political Action Conference	US	2020–2022
Pan-Europa Conference	Ukraine	2017–2018
Awakening Conference	Finland	2018–2019, 2024–2025
Future Forum 2050	Russia	2025
Danube Geopolitical Summit	Hungary	2022–2024
Multipolarity Conferences	online	2023
World Congress of Families Conference	Mexico, Georgia, Moldova, Italy, Hungary	2016–2019, 2022

Table 2: List of communities, their color, and percentage of the entire network.

Community number	Community name	Color	Percentage of network	Number of speakers
4	Pro-Family Cluster	Purple	18.91%	459
5	Continental European Cluster	Blue	18.54%	450
1	American CPAC Post-2020 Cluster	Cyan	15.86%	385
3	American CPAC Pre-2020 Cluster	Red	10.96%	266
0	American NatCon and Natal Cluster	Orange	10.55%	256
7	Extremist Cluster	Pink	9.52%	231
2	Multipolarity / Pro-Russia Cluster	Yellow	8.24%	200
6	British Cluster	Green	7.42%	180

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[1] Manuela Caiani, La transnazionalizzazione della destra radicale: Identità, reticoli, pratiche (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 2025): 135–168; Rita Abrahamsen et al., World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024); José Pedro Zúquete and Riccardo Marchi, eds., Global Identitarianism (London: Routledge, 2023).

[2] Grant Silverman, “Building the International Right: The American Conservative Union and CPAC,” Transnational History of the Far Right series, no. 29 (Washington, DC: Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, 2025), 12, https://www.illiberalism.org/building-the-international-right-the-american-conservative-union-and-cpac/; Pauline Picco, Liaisons Dangereuses (Rennes: Presse Universitaire Rennes, 2016); Pierre Abramovici, “The World Anti-Communist League: Origins, Structures and Activities,” in Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities, and Networks, ed. Luc van Dongen et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388803_8.

[3] Caiani, La transnazionalizzazione della destra radicale, 169–214; Kristina Stoeckl and Phillip Ayoub, “Transnational Illiberal Networks,” in The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197639108.013.29.

[4] Nancy Ettlinger, “Far-Right Transnationalism, Digital Affordances, and the Specter of a New Geopolitics,” Human Geography, SAGE Publications, February 25, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786251318633.

[5] Bharath Ganesh and Caterina Froio, “A ‘Europe des Nations’: Far Right Imaginative Geographies and the Politicization of Cultural Crisis on Twitter in Western Europe,” Journal of European Integration 42, no. 5 (2020): 715–732, https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2020.1792462; Bharath Ganesh and Caterina Froio, “Transnational Far-Right Digital Publics and Radicalisation,” in Radicalisation: A Global and Comparative Perspective, eds. James R. Lewis and Akil N. Awan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197771266.003.0013.

[6] Francesco Vittonetto, “Transnational Publics of the Populist Radical Right: Patterns of Topic Convergence across Europe and the United States,” Australian Journal of Political Science, (September 9, 2025) [Find the real citation data.]: 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2025.2561592.

[7] Jordan McSwiney et al., “Sharing the Hate? Memes and Transnationality in the Far Right’s Digital Visual Culture,” Information, Communication & Society 24, no. 16 (2021): 2502–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1961006; Caterina Froio and Bharath Ganesh, “The Transnationalisation of Far Right Discourse on Twitter: Issues and Actors That Cross Borders in Western European Democracies,” European Societies 21, no. 4 (2019): 513–39, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2018.1494295; Sebastian Stier et al., “Going Transnational? Candidates’ Transnational Linkages on Twitter during the 2019 European Parliament Elections,” West European Politics 44, no. 7 (2021): 1455–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2020.1812267.

[8] Manuela Caiani, “Normalization through Transnationalization? Far Right International Coordination and Cooperation,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies, (2025): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2025.2543333.

[9] Ramona Coman et al., “Building and Legitimizing an Illiberal Transnational Field: Illiberal Think Tanks’ Struggle for Cultural Hegemony in Poland and Hungary,” European Political Science 24, no. 3 (2025): 513–531, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-025-00544-6.

[10] Antonis Klapsis, “An Unholy Alliance: The European Far Right and Putin’s Russia,” European View 14, no. 1 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1007/s12290-015-0359-1. For an example of this process failing, see Pierre Mourier et al., “Hate without Borders: The Alt-Right and Transnational Liaisons,” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 5, no. 2 (Summer 2025): 69–84, https://doi.org/10.53483/ZCQW3603.

[11] Katrine Fangen and Manès Weisskircher, “Reaching Out beyond the National Border? How Far-Right Actors in Germany and Norway Evaluate Transnationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 30, no. 4 (2024): 683–699, https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.13021.

[12] For those who are interested in such an overview on the topic of the far right and technology, see Bharath Ganesh, “The Western Far Right and Digital Technology: Fuzzy Collectivity From Translocal Whiteness to Networked Metapolitics,” Sociology Compass 19, no. 2 (2025): e70038, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.70038.

[13] Manuela Caiani and Batuhan Eren, “The Transnationalisation of Illiberalism (and Democratic Resistance) in Europe,” IDS Bulletin 56, no. 1 (2025), https://doi.org/10.19088/1968-2025.129.

[14] Guillem Colom, “An International Far-Right Alliance? A Comparative Analysis of the Linkages between the Republican Party and European Far-Right Parties,” SSRN Scholarly Paper no. 4739346 (Social Science Research Network, February 26, 2024), https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4739346; “Mapping the Far Right: The Movement’s Conferences Illuminate Its Growing Transnational Networks,” Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, n.d., https://globalextremism.org/reports/mapping-the-far-right-the-movements-conferences-illuminate-its-growing-transnational-networks/; Erik Piccoli, “The American Friend: Trans-Atlantic Illiberal Events and Prospects for Joint Ideological Development,” Journal of Illiberalism Studies, 5, no. 3 (2025): 41–57, https://doi.org/10.53483/ZCRV3611.

[15] “Natal Conference 2025,” Natal Conference, n.d., https://www.natalism.org.

[16] Marlene Laruelle, “Introduction: Illiberalism Studies as a Field,” in The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197639108.013.49.

[17] The reader might note the inclusion of an online series of “events,” the Multipolarity events, and one event in Mexico. These were included since the article focuses on actor networks rather than strict geographic locations alone, and since each event featured significant participation from European and North American actors coupled with the fact that they were coordinated by organizations based either in Europe or the United States, they were included.

[18] Vincent D. Blondel et al., “Fast Unfolding of Communities in Large Networks,” Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment 2008, no. 10 (2008): P10008, https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/P10008.

[19] M. E. J. Newman, “Modularity and Community Structure in Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 103, no. 23 (2006): 8577–82, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0601602103.

[20] M. E. J. Newman, “Analysis of Weighted Networks,” Physical Review E 70, no. 5 (2004): 056131, https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.70.056131.

[21] Blondel et al., “Fast Unfolding of Communities in Large Networks,” p. 4.

[22] In ForceAtlas2, “nodes repulse each other like charged particles, while edges attract their nodes, like springs. These forces create a movement that converges to a balanced state. This final configuration is expected to help the interpretation of the data.” See Mathieu Jacomy et al., “ForceAtlas2, a Continuous Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization Designed for the Gephi Software,” PLOS ONE 9, no. 6 (2014): e98679, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0098679.

[23] Santo Fortunato and Marc Barthélemy, “Resolution Limit in Community Detection,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104, no. 1 (2007): 36–41, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0605965104.

[24] “Budapest Demographic Summit Champions ‘Traditional Family Values,’ ” Euronews, September 16, 2023, http://www.euronews.com/2023/09/16/budapest-demographic-summit-champions-traditional-family-values; Doris Buss and Didi Herman, Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

[25] While ties between the Natal conference and pro-family cluster exist, the Louvain algorithm has indicated that these ties were not sufficiently strong to place them in the same cluster.

[26] Périne Schir, “Blurring Boundaries: The Catholic Traditionalist and Identitarian Nexus in the Contemporary French Far Right,” IERES Occasional Papers, Transnational History of the Far Right series, February 26, 2025, https://www.illiberalism.org/blurring-boundaries-the-catholic-traditionalist-and-identitarian-nexus-in-the-contemporary-french-far-right/; Adrien Nonjon, “Olena Semenyaka, The ‘First Lady’ of Ukrainian Nationalism,” Illiberalism Studies Program Working Papers, October 20, 2020, https://www.illiberalism.org/olena-semenyaka-the-first-lady-of-ukrainian-nationalism/; Stephanie Thomas, “Remigration, or the Rebranding of Extremism,” IERES Occasional Papers, Transnational History of the Far Right series, November 3, 2025, https://www.illiberalism.org/remigration-or-the-rebranding-of-extremism/.

[27] Note that, as mentioned previously, the term “illiberal right” serves as the most appropriate descriptor to characterize the network on the whole. Still, this does not mean that they are homogenous in terms of their ideological background, discursive style, and the positions they advance. In fact, as the Louvain algorithm uncovered, the network appears to be segmented into a mainstream illiberal right, which appears in the major cluster of events, and a fringe illiberal right, which appears within communities two (yellow) and seven (pink). Therefore, it is important to disassociate these two strands within the illiberal right ecosystem.

[28] “What Is ARC?” Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), n.d., https://www.arc-conference.com/about; “Baroness Philippa Stroud,” GOV.UK, n.d., https://www.gov.uk/government/people/philippa-stroud; Peter Geoghegan, “Making Media Great Again,” Politics & Economics, London Review of Books, March 6, 2025, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n04/peter-geoghegan/making-media-great-again.