ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the rapid growth and the disintegration of the Soldiers of Odin in Norway. The Norwegian chapter gradually broke away from the Finnish mother chapter and later also with SOO World Wide, mainly because the SOO Norway leadership was uncomfortable with the increasingly right-wing extremist and anti-Islam profile of the mother organization. One main reason for this appears to be that the Norwegian SOO leaders and much of the membership had a different agenda than anti-immigration and anti-Islam activism. A large proportion of the members and leaders were young men known in their communities as petty criminals and troublemakers, and they saw SOO’s street patrols as an opportunity to make up for their past and improve their tarnished identity and reputation. Any association with right-wing extremism or violent vigilantism would undermine that effort of identity change, making the SOO Norway strive hard to distance themselves from this. However, the police did not want to cooperate with Soldiers of Odin, and eventually banned the use of hoodies with SOO symbols during street walks, claiming that such uniforms would represent a breach of the police monopoly of patrolling streets to maintain public safety. Partly due to this ban on uniforms, in combination with internal conflicts over the high proportion of leaders and members with a criminal past within the organization, SOO Norway closed down after about a year of activity.
