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.