2026 Theses Bachelor's

Incitement in Eastern European Far-Right Digital Spaces: Testing the Rabat Plan of Action

Bulzan, Mara

International human rights law requires states to prohibit incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence, yet existing frameworks fail to recognize incitement when it is assembled online in a cumulative, coded, and seemingly harmless way. This paper examines how incitement is constructed in far-right Telegram channels in Romania, Hungary, and Poland to assess the extent to which the dominant human rights framework for identifying incitement, the Rabat Plan of Action, captures incitement in digital extremist environments.

Drawing on an original dataset of 521 posts from 17 public Telegram channels coded across three variables derived from the Rabat threshold test, the study finds that harmful framing, group targeting, and mobilizing cues are all pervasive but rarely converge within the same post. These patterns suggest that incitement risk is not carried by discrete statements but assembled across a communicative environment that socializes audiences into a shared worldview, diffuses authority across anonymous networks, and renders even low-intensity content actionable over time. The paper argues that applying human rights frameworks to digital extremist spaces requires shifting the unit of analysis from the individual post to the broader communication environment and analyzing it holistically.