.The year 2016 will always be remembered as a watershed moment in the West. Brexit and Trump’s election signified a widespread shift toward right-wing populism

The manufactured anxieties of immigration have not just been orchestrated in the UK through the seismic rise of Reform UK, but interestingly throughout Europe, with nations such as Italy, Hungary, France, and Germany, to name a few, all constructing narratives of minority groups as an ‘enemy within’.

The riots last week in Northern Ireland sang from the hymn sheet of the Southport riots just shy of two years prior, with anti-migrant rhetoric fuelling violence. This mobilisation of the far-right is architected through turning minority groups into the ‘problem’. Distinctively, this draws parallels to the ‘Troubles’, where the British state positioned Catholic and nationalist communities as ‘dangerous’, justifying harsher surveillance and policing. The same internal enemy logic we see is being extended to black and minority communities in Northern Ireland.