Anti-Fascist Action and the transversal territorialities of militant anti-fascism in 1990s Britain

This paper explores the significance of unorthodox territorial activisms through the study of Anti-Fascist Action (AFA), a militant anti-fascist organisation in the United Kingdom and Ireland that operated at its height between 1989 and 1996. In the literature on activist territorialities, little has been written on practices that confront other non-state territorialities. Likewise, despite a small but growing geographical literature on far right populism, anti-fascism is under-researched. Through archival materials and interviews with former activists, I argue that geographers can understand AFA’s militant anti-fascism as transversal, following Felix Guattari’s theorisation of the term. AFA operated beyond state-centric modes of territoriality, creating malleable pathways between different operational logics, cross-cutting state and non-state forms. Thinking transversally about territory helps to disembed epistemic and ontological framings from dominant statist logics and assumptions, opening up new ways of understanding how movements operate territorially. The paper concludes with reflections for contemporary antifascisms.