CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Szabó, Natasa |
|---|---|
| Title | We are the State, We are the People: Forex Loan Debtors' Struggles for Citizenship in Hungary |
| Summary | The global financial crisis of 2008 resulted in a foreign-currency (forex) loan crisis in Hungary, leaving several hundred thousand people in the risk of losing their home. Following the crisis a small group of borrowers started to mobilize, and soon founded diverse organizations to address their situation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork this thesis is about these debtors’ struggles for housing. It is about their claims and their critiques. However, these struggles are also about much more than housing: they are struggles for citizenship, for the right to be decommodified, and for being recognized as legitimate political subjects. This thesis mostly draws on two concepts, that of citizenship and that of civil society. I consider debtors’ struggles as acts of citizenship – as struggles for the right to be decommodified and for the right to have political voice. Nevertheless, my intention is to think about these acts of citizenship as being embedded within a historically bound and relational space: civil society. Through this conceptualization, this thesis aims to go beyond the narratives which describe debtors’ struggles as ‘neonationalist’, and to show how citizenship is also characterized by more than a mere relation to the state. My empirical data demonstrate that apart from contesting the elite-state projects and the emerging welfare regimes, debtors’ struggles are also positioned by and devoted to challenging the hegemonies within civil society and the country’s global capitalist integration. |
| Supervisor | Zentai, Violetta; Rajaram, Prem Kumar |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/szabo_natasa.pdf |
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