CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Szoke, Alexandra |
|---|---|
| Title | Rescaling States - Rescaling Insecurities: Rural Citizenship at the Edge of the Hungarian State |
| Summary | This dissertation examines how the ongoing neoliberal state restructuring in Hungary affects rural areas through the lens of two remote villages and analyses the ways in which rural inhabitants/officials reposition themselves and their locality within the currently emerging state spaces. The capitalist scalar restructuring along with the post-1989 state decentralisation and accession to the EU has brought a variety of new opportunities for remote rural places, but has also produced manifold insecurities. Extending the theoretical framework of neoliberal state restructuring to rural localities outside the core economies allows for a critique of the popular interpretation that the ‘post-socialist transition’ can explain Hungary’s current wide-scale unemployment, entrenched poverty, ethnic tensions, high levels of individual indebtedness and uneven development. This dissertation utilises ethnographic methods to delineate the present form of these processes with a particular emphasis on the practices of local state officials in three crucial areas: social security, development and access to resources. The responsibilities in these areas are shifting from the centre to the local state and to individuals and their families, resulting in a rescaling of insecurities. The dissertation examines the social processes through which state rescaling is taking place, the ways local officials/inhabitants cope with the consequent rescaling of insecurities and the ways these reconfigure the relationship between rural inhabitants and the state. It is argued that the consequences of this state rescaling on social citizenship can be only captured by a spatially sensitive conceptualisation of citizenship, which integrates the experience of rural inhabitants. Delineating what rural citizenship might entail, it is shown that such a conceptualisation should not only encompass rights, obligations and claim making but should also take into account: 1) interactions between inhabitants and state officials (the spatial closeness of state actors and citizens); 2) positionality (the unequal relations between localities and scales in the continuously shifting global hierarchy); 3) relations to place (the belonging and identity citizens ascribe to their locality). |
| Supervisor | Çağlar, Ayşe; Rajaram, Prem Kumar. |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/sphsza01.pdf |
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