A spectre is haunting Europe. Not for the first time, right-wing racist movements are on the march across that continent, with parliamentary beachheads in a number of nations, as well, of course, as the possibly disintegrating European parliament. These troubling processes were under way when this special issue was planned in 2014, arising from a session, on right-wing racist populism, of the Research Committee on Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic Relations (RC05) of the International Sociological Association at its congress in Yokohama. The session had been proposed in 2012, and already the signs were there that nationalist, anti-immigrant and Islamophobic movements and political parties were on the rise, from the upsurge of Golden Dawn in economic crisis-ridden Greece, to the arrival of English Defence League (EDL) thugs on British streets. As yet then, Brexit was inconceivable, however, and indeed it failed to be conceived by the British elite until they were surprised by the 2016 referendum and the effectiveness of its antiimmigration campaign. The crisis of refugees fleeing from war in Syria and other devastation from the Arab Winter had not been imaginedat least not in the scale that eventuated, with its impact and reaction in Europe. We are currently confronted by all of these realities; can we make sociological sense of the bigger picture? The EDL, the mainstreaming of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) that claimed victory in the Brexit vote, the rehabilitation and popularity of the National Front in France, the advent of Alternative für Deutschland (AfDwhich has, as we write, just won the second-largest party share of the vote in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state election), the 'protest' phenomenon of Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident (PEGIDA) in Germany (and somewhat beyond), the continued interventions of the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands and their gains in the national and European parliaments, the very close-run Austrian presidential election in 2016 (to be rerun in October) with far-right-wing populist Austrian Freedom Party candidate, Norbert Hofer, gaining almost 50 per cent of the vote, in Sweden the rise in support for the far-right populist anti-immigration party the Swedish Democrats, and in Greece the popular and electoral surge of the aforementioned Golden Dawn: this is by no means a comprehensive listing, even for Europe. Nor is the growth of right-wing populist, nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-asylum seeker, anti-Muslim politics confined to Europe. Donald Trump's phenomenal