Youths gather in front of a burning barricade on Duncairn Gardens on June 9 in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
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Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
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The violence that drove scores of ethnic minorities from their homes earlier this month in Belfast, Northern Ireland, has drawn attention from those who study violent extremism in the U.S.
The disorder followed the grisly stabbing of 44-year-old Stephen Ogilvie on June 8, caught on video and widely circulated on social media, by a 30-year old Sudanese man who was seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. The victim survived but was seriously injured; the alleged perpetrator has been charged with attempted murder. The stabbing set off unruly protests in which masked, anti-immigrant mobs set fire to vehicles and homes in predominantly ethnic minority neighborhoods.
Now there are questions about how participants organized so quickly and whether a network of neo-Nazi youth groups, called “active clubs,” played a role.
“Effectively, they saw their model in action,” said Michael Colborne, journalist and researcher for Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group based in the Netherlands. “They saw masked young men committing political violence and in a model that they … would actually further like to emulate themselves.”
Active clubs have been on the rise in recent years across Western Europe and the U.S.. Organized locally but with well-established transnational ties through digital platforms and conferences, they structure their activities around a shared interest in mixed martial arts training.
“The whole point of participating in combat sports for them isn’t like it is for most other people who might want to just go get fit, taking a kickboxing class or learning self-defense or bettering themselves,” said Colborne. “Their interest in combat sports is explicitly about preparing for political violence.”
A social media flurry on active club accounts that preceded and followed the unrest in Belfast has spurred reporting in Wired that they may have helped to orchestrate or instigate the attacks. If true, this would represent a significant escalation in those groups’ public activities. But those claims are eliciting skepticism from observers who are familiar with the particulars of Northern Ireland’s political history, social infrastructure and increasingly violent anti-immigrant sentiment across the U.K.
“Unfortunately, the U.K. is somewhat of a tinderbox at the moment,” said Sid Venkataramakrishnan, analyst and editorial manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit organization that tracks and counters extremism. “And you know, even if I suspect the active clubs hadn’t been promoting this, you’d still see violence in Belfast as you’ve seen in countless other cities [in the U.K.].”
“Make them terrified …”
The Telegram account of a neo-fascist group in Northern Ireland, called the Ulster Youth Club, has fed speculation that active clubs may have helped mobilize people to the streets. The account shared a post from another U.K.-based Telegram account that urged white men to take action against non-white people and “Make them terrified they are trapped on an island with you.”
The morning after the stabbing attack, hours before the riots began, the Ulster Youth Club’s account posted advice to those “doing the rounds.” It told would-be street protesters not to bring smartphones, smartwatches, to wear hats and gloves, and to cover up tattoos.
Following the unrest, which was described by some in Belfast as a pogrom, a Substack account associated with the active club movement published a detailed postmortem of the rioters’ operational security tactics. In particular, it lauded participants in the mob who “conducted phone searches” of “opportunistic videographers” who might otherwise have captured footage that could help to identify those engaged in criminal activity. Similarly, the Ulster Youth Club’s Telegram account stated “‘Citizen journalists’ explicitly not welcome” in its post about preparing for street action.
“It was a pretty explicit way of framing — for their far-right audience — framing how one should go about committing this kind of violence,” said Colborne.
Nonetheless, it is unclear whether people affiliated with the active club network were among those in the streets on June 9, the day after Ogilvie was stabbed. So far, no known identifications of individuals known to be affiliated with the neo-Nazi groups have been made. Instead, experts say the factors that led to a relatively rapid mobilization of people to the streets are markers of an environment that has developed over a much longer period of time.
“I think it’s worth bearing in mind [that] Northern Ireland, Belfast, has a history of sectarian violence, has a history of Loyalist groups obviously [that] have previously been involved in violent attacks,” said Venkataramakrishnan, referring to largely Protestant, working-class formations that fought to keep Northern Ireland within the U.K. “So I think it’s hard to attribute it specifically to active clubs.”
The influence of sectarian violence on the anti-immigrant movement
Violent anti-immigrant mobilizations have, in recent years, become an annual summer occurrence in Northern Ireland. In August 2024, Belfast was one of many U.K. sites where the killing of three young girls at a dance class in Southampton, England, triggered widespread disorder. The man convicted was U.K.-born, to Rwandan immigrant parents. Then, in 2025, an alleged sexual assault of a girl in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, led to groups targeting ethnically Roma residents and, ultimately, driving hundreds from that town.
In each instance, influential far-right figures in the U.K. — and even some in the U.S., like billionaire Elon Musk, who has railed against demographic changes in both countries — seized upon crimes committed against white U.K. residents to amplify a broader message about mass expulsion of non-whites. On social media, particularly on Facebook, anti-immigrant networks also use these cases to organize on-street action.
“The U.K. infrastructure of the far right has become quite … geared towards making rapid action,” said Venkataramakrishnan. “And that’s in terms of promoting action online and in terms of support offline.”
Venkataramakrishnan and others also say more must be learned about the influence of people who were active in paramilitary groups during Northern Ireland’s decades of religious strife, often called “The Troubles.”
“There are members of the identified anti-immigration network in Northern Ireland that self-identify as being former Loyalist prisoners, and that’s how they self-identify,” said a representative of a volunteer group called The Accountability Project, which monitors anti-immigrant networks on Facebook.
The Accountability Project came together in the wake of the 2025 violence in Ballymena with the goal of identifying early signs of planned violence. The representative, like others in the group, asked that her name not be used in public reporting about their activities.
But she noted that the age of paramilitary veterans is older than many of those that she observed in footage of the recent violence in Belfast. While she said her group saw open planning on Facebook for the street mobilization, she suspects that the young masked men who were at the front lines of arson attacks were actually in touch via closed communication applications like Signal, WhatsApp or Telegram.
“I think the questions that come away from that is, are they connected to paramilitaries?” she said. “And so where’s the link between the network that we examine on social media, on Facebook, and the closed comm systems that are used to mobilize young people?”
As police in Northern Ireland continue to investigate the recent unrest, she said there will be great interest in whether they uncover answers to some of these questions.
