The aim of our study has been to capture radical left activists' perceptions of governmental measures to prevent radicalization, as well as the experienced effects of being labelled as violent extremists.
Scholars have emphasised a need to understand how protestors and to repression, in order to understand how it affects their cognition, practices, and mobilization patterns.
To do so we interviewed 31 activists from the (RLLM), most of which have been active in the four organizations that were labeled as violence-affirming extremists by the National coordinator against violent extremism in 2015:
Antifascistisk aktion, (Anti-Fascist Action, AFA), Syndikalistiska Ungdomsförbundet (Anarcho-Syndicalist Youth Federation, SUF), Revolutionära Fronten (Revolutionary Front, RF) and Förbundet Allt åt Alla (Association Everything to Everyone, AåA).
As a basis for understanding the diverging effects of labelling, the next section presents a model that captures fundamental differences between radical social movement organizations. Thereafter, we present our main findings.
Specifying radical groups' characteristics
The four labeled groups are all part of the same movement and are linked through collective identities, ideological affinities, joint mobilizations, and movement infrastructures.
They can all be considered radical in the sense that they strive for profound structural change and define themselves as revolutionary organizations that do not limit themselves by existing laws.
However, the four groups are also dissimilar in many respects.
By using protest event data for the year 1998-2016 (covering 3836 self-reported RLLM protests), we show that the groups have been active in different periods, that they differ in their goals, the issues they engage in and the protest tactics they employ.
Figure 1 below captures fundamental differences between the four organizations, by positioning them along three axes that can be used to differentiate generally.
The horizontal axis captures the differences in protest tactics, understood as a distinction between violent a
