
Kristof SzombatiInstitut für Europäische Ethnologie Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Kristof Szombati
Doctor of Philosophy
I am PI of an ethnographic research project focusing on football and right-wing milieux in East Germany.
About
13
Publications
3,547
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
185
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
My general interest is in the politics of race and right-wing social movements in Central Europe. My doctoral research focused on the racialization of socio-economically marginalized rural surplus populations and the rise of far-right politics in Hungary. In my first post-doctoral project I analyzed the role of state-enabled grassroots clientelism in the consolidation of rightist hegemony. My new research focuses on right-wing social movements in deindustrialized East German urban settings.
Publications
Publications (13)
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
Projects
Projects (4)
Nationalist forces in both western and eastern Europe are asserting their Europeanness with ever clearer ethnic-racial undertones. This project focuses on the racialization of the Roma minority in Central and Eastern Europe and the politicization of the 'Gypsy question'. I seek to uncover the historical roots and socio-economic drivers of 'popular anti-Gypsyism', analyze the strategies whereby right-wing movements and parties have attempted to construe the Roma as a threat to the national community, and theorize the linkages between anti-Gypsyism and other exclusionary ideologies and discourses such as anti-Muslimism and anti-Semitism.
This was my PhD project in which I explored the making of right-wing hegemony by tracing the spread of racist sensibilities in depressed rural areas, and showing how activists, intellectuals and politicians took advantage of popular racism to empower right-wing agendas.
This is a new research project I started at the MPI. It builds on, but also departs from the topic of my PhD, which was the rise of anti-Gypsyism and its role in the making of a new radical rightist hegemony in Hungary. This project seeks to contribute to and extend our understanding of the key features, hegemonic strategy and stability of the new political regime that Fidesz built after 2010. I take inspiration from Stuart Hall's conceptualization of Thatcherism and, more particularly, his focus on 'authoritarian populism': the reconstruction of the (neo)liberal state in a way as to disaggregate the (civic and political) opposition, prevent the politicization of social grievances, and win a strategic measure of popular consent to underpin rulers' authority. The project will seek to map this novel hegemonic strategy and contrast it with strategies deployed by illiberal rulers in semi-peripheral countries such as Turkey as well as right-wing ruling parties in core European countries. It complements and relies on my friend and former colleague Gabor Scheiring's analysis of the emergent 'accumulative state', which offers a political solution to manage the internal contradictions of dependent development on the EU's periphery by fostering short-term capital accumulation in both multinational and domestic sectors of the economy. My departing axiom is that strategies which rely on an authoritarian populist logic (i.e. they address people's lived experience in a way that is in line with rightist discourse and policies) are instrumental in generating consent among the losers of the new accumulation regime. The project will to seek shed light on these strategies by showing how they function in practice. It will result in several journal articles, as well as shorter commentary pieces.