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Home Outputs The Figure of the Wolf in German Far-Right Politics: Deliberations on Nature and Nationalism with Julia Leser
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17. 2. 2025

The Figure of the Wolf in German Far-Right Politics: Deliberations on Nature and Nationalism with Julia Leser

We are delighted to invite you to a lecture by Julia Leser (CRC Dynamics of Security, Marburg University) on Wednesday, March 5, 2025.

Discussant: Thorsten Gieser (Institute of Ethnology, CAS)

Details of the Event:

  • Date: March 5, 2025
  • Time: 14:00 – 15:30 CET
  • Location: Institute of Ethnology CAS, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Praha 1 (5th floor) and on Teams (link HERE)

Julia Leser explores the intersection of socio-ecological transformation, far-right politics, and imaginaries of (un)governability. While renaturation efforts have transformed the post-industrial landscape in Lusatia, Germany, the return of wolves has become a focal point for political instrumentalization, particularly among far-right movements like the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The AfD instrumentalizes wolf populations as a symbolic parallel to migration, reinforcing xenophobic fears and violent imaginaries. With an ethnographic lens, this paper explores the far right’s contemporary ‘wolf politics’ and situates the underlying imaginaries of these kind of politics within broader processes of nation- and nature-making, tracing, in particular, how the governance and extermination of species have historically mirrored colonial and nationalist endeavours. Leser shows how the far right’s rhetoric on wolves reflects deeper entanglements of ecological transformation, territorial entitlement, and exclusionary identity politics. With ‘wolf politics’, histories of violence resurface in modern political discourse.

About the Speaker:

Julia Leser is currently a Fellow at the CRC “Dynamics of Security” at Marburg University. Her research lies at the intersection of political science and political anthropology, with a focus on policing, migration control, nationalism, right-wing extremism, political ethnography, and affect theory. She earned her PhD from Leipzig University in 2019 and most recently held a postdoctoral researcher position at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is co-author of the book The Wolves Are Coming Back: The Politics of Fear in Eastern Germany (with Rebecca Pates, 2021, Manchester University Press).