Andreas Önnerfors

Linnaeus University | lnu · Fojo

LVU-kampanjen och koranbränningarna har blottat sårbarheter i den svenska opinionsbildningen med globala konsekvenser. Konflikter kring sociala myndigheters ingripanden, yttrandefrihetens och hetslagstiftningens gränser och kulturell rasism i de digitala mediernas tidevarv visar hur utsatta de svenska medierna och därmed offentligheten är för möjli...

Across the past year a huge Twitter campaign against the Swedish social services authorities has been launched. A previous study examining Arab Diaspora online platforms in Sweden underlined that the Arab diaspora online community in Sweden was angry and hostile describing alleged abuses of Swedish social benefits. Racialization and discrimination...

Det tog tre år innan den finska journalisten Jessikka Aros bok Putins troll – sanna berättelser från fronten i Rysslands informationskrig utkom i en svensk översättning. Först efter anfallskriget mot Ukraina på våren 2022 har svenska läsare kunnat ta del av hennes djupdykning i maskineriet av rysk informationspåverkan. Aros journalistiska gärning h...

Medierna och kunskapsresistens-rapport från en konferens vid Stockholms universitet Mellan den 23 och 25 augusti 2022 genomfördes det av filosofen Åsa Wikforss vid Stockholms universitet och medieforskaren Jesper Strömbeck vid Göteborgs universitet ledda projektet "Knowledge Resistance", finansierat av Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, en konferens med...

För den som fortfarande har tid för fördjupande läsning rekommenderas varmt boken Real Fake: Playing with Reality in the Age of AI, Deepfakes and the Metaverse (Ludibrium, 2021) som recenseras nedan. Boken uppställer den provocerande tesen att människan först och främst är berättare och spelare och utstakar sin svåra relation till verkligheten geno...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of knowledge in times of crisis. Various conspiratorial meaning-making narratives have been spread since the pandemic began in 2020 to explain to people why the crisis is happening, but also with the intention of consciously manipulating us. The WHO describes an ‘infodemic’ – in other words, a vir...

What are the implications of conspiracy theories in and about Europe in our contemporary political culture? How can we understand the contradictory idea of Europe as either an absolute and destructive power or a weak and divided continent facing imminent collapse? In the first part of our concluding chapter, we propose that conspiracy theories, as...

As CARR Senior Fellow, Dr Andreas Önnerfors notes: the 153 pages of rage contained in Akif Pirinçci’s Umvolkung (2016) book openly incites hatred against the ‘invaders’ as much as against their presumed puppet-masters, saturated by a vulgar language of violence, it is a racist rant of baseless accusations. As Önnerfors finds, it does not surprise u...

What is the momentum of “retrotopia”, utopian longing for the past in political mobilization? In how far are sentiments of nostalgia and melancholia at play as drivers for political changes and retrogressive mobilization? The rise and success of PEGIDA in Germany 2014 as a civil society organization of the “European New Right” (ENR) raises several...

The anti-Semitic terrorist attack on Yom Kippur in Halle an der Saale in the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt (former part of the GDR) tragically reminds us of that the womb of virulent enemy images and conspiracy theories is far from sterile. To the contrary, anti-Semitic imagination in contemporary Germany fuels radicalization into violent and leth...

Radical-right radicalization has quickly moved from being a fringe domestic phenomenon to a mainstream global movement. The radical right, albeit always internationally connected and aligned across individual states, has over the last decade moved to increasingly intertangled structures, not only in terms of technical platforms of communication but...

Note (2019-07-09): This unpublished manuscript was written originally in 2008 and slightly revised in 2019 without updating the bibliography. What is expressed, is not everything. It is the Un-Outspoken that turns the Outspoken to the Word that can reach us.

This is a collection of lectures presented at the Faculty of International Relations at the University of Amman, Jordan, in which I outline aspects of normative foundations of International Relations and some of its significant issues. From the introduction: "My personal opinion is that political studies have profited from to extend the scope of...

The political landscape in Europe is currently going through a phase of rapid change. New actors and movements that claim to represent 'the will of the people' are attracting considerable public attention, with dramatic consequences for election outcomes. This volume explores the new political order with a particular focus on discursive constructio...

After the 1848 revolutions in Europe, waves of European émigrés, many of them Germans, settled in the United States. These Forty-Eighters faced challenging choices in their relationship to American society, oscillating around assimilation, adaptation, alienation and open antagonism. The arrival of thousands of refugees from revolutions repositioned...

It was born of the dark web amongst the Swedish radical right—a meme naming the tiny city of Finspång, in the province of Ostrogothia, as the place where in the fictional future ‘national traitors’ would be executed in large sways once fascists took power. Images have circulated of people hanged on street-lamps and cranes, together with the slogan...

The far-right terrorist attack of Christchurch was staged ‘in real life’ (IRL) with the purpose to create maximum impact through dissemination online. Facebook is said to have removed no less than 1,5m videos of the terror attack during the first 24 hours, which demonstrates the magnitude of terrorism as an act of strategic communication (Falkheime...

Önnerfors explores how, over the last five years, the German political discourse has experienced a move to the right, or Rechtsruck. The way political problems have been framed, Önnerfors argues, represents a radicalization of political language in post-unification Germany. Focusing on PEGIDA or ‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the...

This edited collection considers whether it is possible to discern how the level of ideology is affected by radicalization. In other words: what happens in the minds of people before they decide to use political violence as means to attain their goals? Also this book asks: what has to happen in the minds of people in order to preclude them from usi...

Cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism is, on the one hand, a collective term used to denote various forms of global thought developed in the history of philosophy since Greek antiquity and, on the other hand, a concept that has emerged in recent debates on moral responses to (economic) globalization. Both notions are nondoctrinal, as there is no specific...

Ett fuskarbete som inte bör ges stöd " | SvD Sida 1 av 3 https://www.svd.se/ett-fuskarbete-som-inte-bor-ges-stod " MSB har visat en skrämmande omedvetenhet om vetenskapssamhällets kvalitetsstandarder. Och det hjälper ingen. Det skriver Andreas Önnerfors, docent i Idé-& lärdomshistoria, i en replik om den omdiskuterade rapporten om islamism. En rad...

In the aftermath of the Norwegian terror attacks of 22 July 2011, the question of agency with regard to the convicted perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, has frequently been discussed. Did he really act on his own? Were his actions self-directed? Was he, as a typical ‘lone wolf’, inspired by the prevalent far-right concept of ‘leaderless resistanc...

This article provides with an overview over institutions, initiatives, projects and publications in the area of contemporary research into freemasonry.

Unlocking translations as tools of scienti c communication. The genesis of Thunberg’s “Travels” in German 1788–1794 by Andreas Önnerfors, Docent, History of ideas, the Department of literature, history of ideas, and religion, University of Gothenburg. Between 1770 and 1779 Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1828), one of the so-called apos- tles of the ren...

This article deals with the secret society 'Order of Walhalla' and its connections to the Anjala-mutiny during the Swedish-Russian war 1788.

http://urplay.se/program/194630-ur-samtiden-ideologisk-radikalisering-erovras-gatan-genom-ideer Over the last decade, European politics has been ridden by recurring crises of complex proportions, pushing the limits of democratic governance as much as of popular reactions against it. Financial crises, austerity measures and geo-political instabili...

This chapter treats the philosophy of Thomas Thorild and his major German outlet Die Gelehrtenwelt (1799/1800).

2011 avkodade svenska och amerikanska datalingvister ett chiffrerat manuskript som förvaras i Uppsala, det så kallade Copiale-manuskriptet av okänd proveniens. Det tyska manuskriptet visade sig innehålla ritualerna för ett sällskap, Okulist-Orden, som i sin mästargrad uppdrog medlemmarna att avslöja frimureriets hemligheter. Betydande delar av manu...

This chapter analyzes correspondence between England and Sweden concerning the 'Unlawful Societies Act' of 1799.

In 2011 data-linguists from Sweden and the US decoded a manuscript written in cipher, the content of which has been unknown for at least the last two centuries. This so-called Copiale-manuscript and the story of its code being broken with methods of new information technology received trans-national media coverage, but its content remains still to...

Conference presentation, Paris, 29 May 2015

‘Illuminism’ is an expression that since the last decade of the eighteenth century has been used to denote a proto-romantic, esoteric and largely subversive undercurrent of Enlightenment reason. The origin of the concept lies within post-revolutionary conspiracy theories (primarily expressed by Augustin Barruel and John Robison) where ‘illuminism’...

A comprehensive study on the Order or "Walhall", a fraternal order among the Swedish armed forced in late eighteenth century Sweden.

Knowledge generation inside freemasonry and within the academic community outside freemasonry is fundamentally different, but not mutually excluding. Whereas research processes within freemasonry create sense in a more or less opaque, self-contained and self-referencing sign system (an ‘emic’ system), academic research into freemasonry (an ‘etic’ s...

I. Leben und historiographische Entwicklung Anders Sture Ragnar Bolin wurde am 27. Mai 1900 in Väsby in der süd-schwedischen Provinz Skåne (Schonen) geboren. Sein Vater arbeitete innerhalb des regionalen Polizeiwesens, an der Universität Lund waren einige Verwandte tätig (vgl. Nilsson 1963; Odén 2011). So verwundert es nicht, dass er bereits als 19...

This postscript outlines trends in nineteenth century European freemasonry.

This article investigates the Swedish connections to the para-masonic sect Les Illuminés d-Avignon in France during the age of the French Revolution.

this article investigates the conceptual relationship between educated culture and freemasonry in the eighteenth century. after its official incep-tion in London in 1717, freemasonry spread within decades as one of the most popular if not paradigmatic forms of sociability, first within Britain, then to france and the rest of europe and overseas col...

Review of Kjell Lekeby, Esoterica i Svenska Frimurarordens arkiv 1776–1803 (Stockholm: Plejaderna 2011). 217 s. Kjell Lekeby, Gustaviansk mystik: alkemister, kabbalister, magiker, andeskådare, astrologer och skattgrävare i den esoteriska kretsen kring G. A. Reuterholm, hertig Carl och hertiginnan Charlotta 1776–1803 (Stockholm: Vertigo 2010). 539...

Just about three months after the storm of the Bastille and only days after Louis XVI had performed his forced move from Versailles to Paris, two pivotal dates in the events of the French revolution, a pair of Swedish masonic travellers to France and Paris, Gustaf Adolf Reuterholm (1756-1813) and Carl Göran Silfverhielm (1759-1808) addressed a lett...

This article treats an episode in the life and work of one of the most prominent Swedish female poets of the eighteenth century, Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht (1718-1763). Based upon a letter to one of her friends, earlier research has speculated on whether Nordenflycht established a fraternal order. New archival evidence suggests that this indeed...

ABSTRACT : Between the Peace of Westphalia and the Congress of Vienna parts of the Old German Empire were ruled in personal union with the Swedish monarchy. Although a major portion of the Swedish trans-Baltic provinces were lost after the Great Nordic War, a tiny territory on the sea shore, Swedish-Pomerania with the port town Stralsund and the un...

“Death is life”: staging of life in European eighteenth century freemasonary This article treats Freemasonry and its transgression of death in the age of enlightenment as cultural performance. After the emergence of mo- dern Freemasonry in London in 1717, its ritual practice was disseminated across Europe and beyond. The Third, or Master’s, Degree...

1700-talet betraktas traditionellt som det sekel när moderniseringen upplever sitt genombrott. Vetenskapen rationaliseras och ställs i samhällets tjänst, nya ekono-miska teorier förändrar handel, jordbruk och industriell produktion, borgerliga revolutioner i Amerika och Frankrike avskaffar monarkin som politiskt styrelse-sätt. Samtidigt som livet f...

The article investigates the relationship between freemasonry and military during the age of enlightenment.

160 of time has to be contextualised within the general press history of the eighteenth century and the relationship between freemasonry and the press in particular. Periodical press is one of the main agents in the formation of public space in the age of Enlightenment. It transported the values and worldviews of the time and allows us an insight i...

The volume gathers a number of papers devoted to the History and Historiography of British Freemasonry.

This chapter examines female participation in the predominantly male and secret social orders at the fringes of Enlightenment Europe, the Swedish province on German soil, Swedish Pomerania. Ideas on female participation in fraternal organization were not only a matter of an elite discourse in the hotbeds of European Enlightenment, they were transmi...

The volume gathers a number of significant works on the history of freemasonry and fraternalism in eighteenth century Russia.

Resumen Este artículo examina la organización de la masonería en San Bartolomé, sus relaciones con la Gran Logia de Suecia, su estructura y actividades. Relaciones que hasta ahora nunca han sido analizadas. El estudio se centra principalmente entre los años 1797-1807, periodo en donde abundan documentos acerca de los rituales de trabajo, la organiz...

This article investigates the Cosmopolitan roots of masonic ideology of the eighteenth century with a particular focus on Ramsay and Wieland.

Academic study of freemasonry has mainly focussed on various aspects of predominantly male sociability in a “Western” context. As fascinating as this research is, it is important to recognise the need to broaden our perspectives. It would be easy to brand freemasonry and related forms of organised sociability as “Western” cultural products, that in...

There is no doubt that what is generally referred to as ‘Ph.D education’ has undergone dramatic changes in Europe in recent years. Whereas the Bologna Process, launched in 1999, originally had in mind to make it easier for undergraduate students to gain international experience and enhance their employability by facilitating mobility and transparen...

Här ges en unik inblick i 1700-talets största svenska sällskap: Svenska Frimurare Orden. Det är en av de första akademiska publikationerna som ägnar sig åt det svenska frimureriet med ambitionen att dekonstruera det lammska paradigmet om frimureriet som ockult anti-upplyst underströmning under det rationella. Genom en analys av frimureriets normat...

The article investigates the contacts between Sweden, Germany and France within European freemasonry of the later eighteenth century.

This volume gathers a number of contributions devoted to issues within European Studies.