News

The Hungarian Optants Question in Transnational Perspectives. International Organizations and Legal Dispute Settlements of Economic and Minority Problems in the Interwar Period

Réka Marchut will give a lecture on "The Influence of Germany on the Diplomatic Debates between Hungary and Romania Referred to the Optants Case" at the international conference on "The Hungarian Optants Question in Transnational Perspectives. International Organizations and Legal Dispute Settlements of Economic and Minority Problems in the Interwar Period", which will take place between 15-16 June at the University of Bucharest. The full programme of the conference is available at HERE.

11th Conference of the European Society on Family Relations

Nóra Kovács and her co-author will present their paper titled 'Resentment in the family. Considerations of an empirical pilot study from Hungary’ at the 11th Conference of the European Society on Family Relations 'Family Life – Troubling Family Relations and Practices' (June 14–16, 2023, Roskilde University, Denmark). The full programme of the conference is available at HERE.

SIEF2023 16th Congress: Living Uncertainty

Judit Durst will give a lecture on "The moral economy of "flexploitation": informal migration intermediaries and their role in transnational labour migration of the rural Hungarian working poor" at the 16th International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) congress on Living Uncertainty, which will take place between 7-10 June in Brno. The panel on "Dependence and Livelihood in times of uncertainty" will also be organised by Judit Durst, Gergely Pulay and Stefánia Toma (National Institute for Minority Research, Cluj-Napoca). The full programme of the event is available HERE.

Populist radical-right governments in Central-Eastern Europe and education policy-making: a comparison of Hungary and Poland

The new article by Eszter Neumann and Pawel Rudnicki is now published in Journal of Contemporary European Studies (IF 1.208) and is available at HERE.

Abstract. In the European political landscape characterized by the strengthening influence of Eurosceptic, radical-right, and populist parties, Hungary and Poland represent insightful cases for understanding how the populist radical right uses its power in government and acts in full capacity to design education policies. From a systematic comparison of the education policy trajectories taken by Hungarian and Polish populist radical-right governments, we identified three characteristic patterns of populist radical-right education policy-making in the two countries: commitment to a conservative-nationalist agenda through comprehensive, systemic interventions, the implementation of Christian identitarianism through conceptualising public education as Christian upbringing, and finally, the gradual extremisation of the education agenda combined with the growing influence of transnational conservative knowledge transfer centred on the ‘gender wars’. We find that the boundary between far-right nativist and nationalist positions and Christian-conservative standpoints has faded away, and the two governments, which identify as Christian conservative, have increasingly mainstreamed far-right agendas.

Non-Territorial Autonomy: An Introduction

The new open access textbook edited by Marina Andeva, Balázs Dobos, Ljubica Djordjevic, Börries Kuzmany and Tove H. Malloy has been now published by Palgrave Macmillan and can be dowloaded at HERE.

This Open Access textbook is a result of the work of ENTAN - European Non-Territorial Autonomy Network. It provides students with a comprehensive analysis of the different aspects and issues around the concept of non-territorial autonomy (NTA). The themes of each chapter have been selected to ensure a multi- and interdisciplinary overview of an emerging research field and show both in theory and in practice the possibilities of NTA in addressing cultural, ethnic, religious and language differences in contemporary societies.

The Populist Radical Right and Public Education

The new article by Eszter Neumann is now published in the Encyclopedia of New Populism and Responses in the 21st Century (Springer, 2023) and is available at HERE.

Abstract. The entry explores how the populist radical right governs education in countries where these parties formed governments in the fourth wave of populism. In broader, systemic issues, populist radical right education policies tend to follow neo-conservative and nationalist approaches and attach the narrow set of ideas prioritized by populist discourse to these frameworks. The populist radical right relies on religion as a source of political legitimacy and resacralizes schooling with the aim of imposing “traditional values” and the “traditional family” model on education. More recently, the transnationalization of radical conservative knowledge transfer influentially forms radical populist education agendas globally.

Minority Politics and International Relations: The Case of the Ukrainian−Hungarian Joint Commission on National Minorities

The new open access article by Csilla Fedinec is published in the recent issue of the Hungarian Journal of Minority Studies and is available at HERE.

Abstract: There are two levels of international relations: multilateral and bilateral. A specific version of bilateral treaties was the conclusion of the basic treaties in the period following the democratic change in Central and Eastern Europe, which, among other things, laid down mutual recognition of borders and the protection of minorities. On the basis of the Hungarian-Ukrainian Declaration on the rights of national minorities, which is stated in Article 17 of the Hungarian-Ukrainian Basic Treaty was established the Hungarian-Ukrainian Joint Commission for National Minorities, whose activities are analysed in this study.

Ignaz Goldziher as a Jewish Orientalist. Traditional Learning, Critical Scholarship, and Personal Piety

The new monograph by Tamás Turán is now published by De Gruyter Press, as the Volume 55 in the series Europäisch-jüdische Studien – Beiträge. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110741285 Further information is available at the publisher's website: HERE.

About this book: Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), one of the founders of modern Arabic and Islamic studies, was a Hungarian Jew and a Professor at the University of Budapest. A wunderkind who mastered Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic as a teenager, his works reached international acclaim long before he was appointed professor in his native country. From his initial vision of Jewish religious modernization via the science of religion, his academic interests gradually shifted to Arabic-Islamic themes. Yet his early Jewish program remained encoded in his new scholarly pursuits. Islamic studies was a refuge for him from his grievances with the Jewish establishment; from local academic and social irritations he found comfort in his international network of colleagues. This intellectual and academic transformation is explored in the book in three dimensions – scholarship on religion, in religion (Judaism and Islam), and as religion – utilizing his diaries, correspondences and his little-known early Hungarian works.

Solidarity with asylum seekers. State, society and education in comparative perspective

Margit Feischmidt, Ildikó Zakariás, András Morauszki, Csilla Zsigmond and their co-authors will attend the hybrid workshop of the Karl Polanyi Research Centre of Global Social Studies on 3 April. Facebook event.

The title and abstract of their presentation: Solidarity with displaced people from Ukraine in Hungary: attitudes and practices. Based on a population survey from the summer of 2022 the presentation draws an ambivalent picture of Hungarian civil society in the context of the war against Ukraine. First, it highlights the exceptional momentum and mobilizing power of civil solidarity both in terms of practical involvement and expressed attitudes. At the same time, the results also reveal the limits and vulnerabilities of civil solidarity: its exposure to populist political discourses, which cherish or condemn moral economies of assistance according to its vested interests, as well as its embeddedness in a neoliberal reliance on citizens’ individual resources (disposable time and material means), and salient inequalities in sharing the burdens of humanitarian support.