Abstract
This Article proposes a new transdisciplinary agenda for global hate studies by connecting previously separate debates in anthropology and criminology. It draws on ongoing ethnographic and computational research, which investigates how Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) hate speech originating in India facilitates distinct forms of ethnic and religious exclusion in the United Kingdom and South Africa - two Indian diasporic centres that have recently witnessed escalating Hindu-Muslim conflict in markedly different ways. The Article aims to answer the following question: what forms of transdisciplinary dialogue and conceptual innovation must social scientists engage in to understand how local cultural, legal, and historical factors facilitate the political mobilisation and violent enactment of global hateful rhetoric on the ground? In response, it makes two methodological and theoretical interventions. First, it proposes that to effectively analyse how transnational digital cultures erode boundaries between virtual and real-world hate, social scientist must embrace iterative computational ethnography: a methodology that systematically integrates offline and digital ethnographic methods with selective forms of computational data extraction and analysis. Second, the Article argues that to understand how digital hate speech is transformed into offline hate crime across varied settings, scholars must reconceptualise this process as a mode of digito-vernacularisation: building on research on the vernacularisation of human rights, this concept captures how hateful discourse is indigenised, and reworked as it travels across distinct legal, historical, and political contexts. Third, the Article proposes that this process can only be countered through historically and culturally informed global policing and cross-sector de-escalation approaches, which are more attuned to the layered and multidirectional movement of hate than conventional models of transnational policing.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.55496/WLJA8879
Included in
Anthropology Commons, Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Law and Society Commons
