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CEP Webinar: The Active Club Network in 2026: Fascist Towns, Riots, Women and Fragile Men

(Berlin, Germany / New York, N.Y.) – The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) invites you to the webinar “The Active Club Network in 2026: Fascist Towns, Riots, Women and Fragile Men” on Tuesday, October 6, 2026.

Active Clubs are a decentralized transnational network of violent extreme-right and white-supremacist groups. Since the publication of CEP’s March 2026 policy brief Return of the Leader – Robert Rundo’s Impact on the Violent Extreme-Right Active Club Network, CEP research has documented a significant evolution of the network’s strategy. Active Club propaganda has used the Belfast riots as a case study in violent mobilization and operational learning; seeks to expand its social base through youth and female recruitment; promotes the creation of Fascist towns; and increasingly presents fitness, belonging, status, and personal transformation as self-help tools to recruit fragile men into organized violence. Taken together, these developments point to a strategy that combines mainstream-facing recruitment with transnational networking, permanent infrastructure, and increased capacity for political violence.

The webinar will examine what these and other developments mean for threat assessment and prevention, with a particular focus on the network’s transnational evolution and its development in Germany.

The webinar will be conducted in English via Zoom.

Date: Tuesday, October 6, 2026

Time:

U.S.: 9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. ET
Europe: 15:00 – 16:30 CEST

EVENT PROGRAM

Speakers:

Alexander Ritzmann

Senior Advisor, Counter Extremism Project (CEP)

The Transnational Active Club Network: Recent Developments

Bastian Stock

Scientific Coordinator, Technical University Dresden (Germany)

Body, Combat, and Camaraderie: Communicative Guidelines in the External

Communication of Active Clubs

Moderator:

Dr. Hans-Jakob Schindler

Senior Director, Counter Extremism Project (CEP) and ARCHER at House 88

The presentations will be followed by a Q&A session open to all participants.

REGISTRATION

To participate in the webinar, please register here:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_W28bysGCQ3KshW00GBNWmw

Please feel free to forward this invitation to colleagues with an interest in the subject.

For media inquiries, please contact: [email protected].

The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) is a nonprofit and non-partisan international policy organization working to combat the growing threat posed by extremist ideologies.

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