Kristof Szombati

Kristof Szombati
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Kristof verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
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Kristof verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
  • Doctor of Philosophy
  • Researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

I am PI of an ethnographic research project focusing on football and right-wing milieux in East Germany.

About

17
Publications
4,643
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284
Citations
Introduction
Scholar-practitioner whose research investigates the interplay of race, class, and right-wing authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe. Currently based at the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt University. My research encompasses the political economy of illiberalism, the governance of poverty, and rural and urban socialities, employing qualitative methodologies. Author of "The Revolt of the Provinces", the first in-depth ethnographic monograph on Hungary's right-wing turn.
Current institution
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Current position
  • Researcher
Additional affiliations
September 2022 - present
Institut für Europäische Ethnologie Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Position
  • Research Fellow
Description
  • I am PI of an ethnographic research project focusing on football and right-wing milieux in East Germany.
June 2021 - August 2022
TK Centre for Social Sciences
Position
  • Research Fellow
Description
  • The focus of my work was illiberal statecraft, in particular the governance of poverty and the politics of race.
Editor roles

Publications

Publications (17)
Book
Full-text available
This is the first in-depth ethnographic monograph on the New Right in Central and Eastern Europe. It explores the making of right-wing hegemony in Hungary over the last decade by highlighting the spread of racist sensibilities in depressed rural areas, and showing how activists, intellectuals and politicians took advantage of popular racism to empo...
Article
Full-text available
This paper analyses the reconfiguration of social relations in rural Hungary after the collapse of socialism as well as the cultural idioms in which these changes were interpreted in order to unearth the connection between structural transformation, the re-articulation of ethnic and peasant traditions and the discourse on Roma as a threat to commun...
Article
Full-text available
This article presents and empirically substantiates a theoretical account explaining the making and stabilisation of illiberal hegemony in Hungary. It combines a Polanyian institutionalist framework with a neo-Gramscian analysis of right-wing hegemonic strategy and a relational class analysis inspired by the political economy tradition in anthropol...
Chapter
Full-text available
The Roma constitute the biggest ethnic minority in Central and Eastern Europe. Originating from India, they have been living in this region for many hundred years. While there have been historical periods when Roma groups were better integrated in economic and social frameworks and enjoyed a relatively stable social standing, today their predicamen...
Article
Full-text available
This essay analyses the consolidation of authoritarian rule in Hungary by focusing attention on the ruling party’s workfare programme, which has become the cornerstone of rural poverty governance. It is argued, on the basis of ethnographic research carried out by the author and the secondary literature, that workfare successfully tamed the angry po...
Article
Full-text available
In this article we seek to shed light on the decline of labour politics in Hungary,, which has been laid bare in a particularly stark manner by the failure of the ‘slave law’ protests and the Left’s dismal electoral performance at the last European parliamentary elections. We focus on political-economic processes that played out over a longer perio...
Article
Full-text available
A short conjunctural analysis focusing on the last wave of anti-governmental mobilizaton in Hungary: the movement born out of resistance to the government's latest re-writing of the labor code.
Book
The first in-depth ethnographic monograph on the New Right in Central and Eastern Europe, The Revolt of the Provinces explores the making of right-wing hegemony in Hungary over the last decade. It explains the spread of racist sensibilities in depressed rural areas, shows how activists, intellectuals and politicians took advantage of popular racism...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Hall's insistence on 'authoritarian populism' as a vehicle for generating electoral support for right-wing political projects is particularly important for understanding the consolidation of neo-liberal hegemony in Eastern Europe where politicians have idealized the principle of 'work' as the cornerstone of the new moral economy. In this paper I dr...
Chapter
Full-text available
Könyvünk egyik központi szándéka az, hogy értelmezze a magyar populáris nacionalizmusnak a kisebbségekhez való viszonyát. Ezen belül kétféle másság kijelölésének következményeire vagyunk elsősorban tekintettel: a kisebbségi magyarokéra a többségben élőkhöz képest, és a cigányként megjelöltekre a jelöletlen magyarokhoz képest. Erre a relációra külön...
Research
Full-text available
The study principally seeks to uncover the antecedents, causes and consequences of the interethnic conflict that was precipitated by an unprecedented far-right mobilization campaign in the village of Gyöngyöspata in the spring of 2011. Although the conflict, which both expressed and reinforced animosity between Roma and non-Roma people, undeniably...
Article
Az elemzés a szervezetek által következetesen követett, piacelvű modernizációs törekvéseket bírálja. Rámutat, hogy a szakmai és társadalmi nyilvánosság előtt haladónak bemutatott vidékfejlesztési modell – minden előnye ellenére – képtelen a fenntarthatósági követelmények és a „kedvezményezettek” tudásának, törekvéseinek ötvözésére. A cikk mindezt k...

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