Revolt of the Provinces

Kristóf Szombati has a background in both activism and academia. He recently completed his PhD at Central European University (Budapest) and received the ‘Best Dissertation’ award for his work on anti-Gypsyism in rural Hungary. He has published articles on far-right movements and on the intersection of politics, ethnicity and ‘race’. He currently holds a Visiting Professorship at Columbia University.

“The book’s main message is a crucial one for making sense of contemporary far-right or populist movements…[It] is useful for students of Central and Eastern Europe, and, given the rise of right-wing populism around the world, it also has applications beyond this part of the globe.” • Anthropologica“The book provides numerous insights into the micro-foundations of the anti-egalitarian and increasingly authoritarian turn in Hungary, where political representatives have consolidated their power on the EU’s periphery at the expense of the most vulnerable segments of society. Szombati’s emphasis on the roles played by economic dispossession, loss of cultural pride and political abandonment in the generation of popular insecurities and racism offers an important corrective to the prevalent facile explanations regarding the rise of East European illiberalisms.” • Europe-Asia Studies“[This book] is an excellent study of the shifting economy, the rise of a far-right political movement, anti-Gypsy racism, and the dominance of a right-wing governing party. It offers a nuanced, innovative and holistic approach to this topic by engaging space, scale, history, racism/race formation, and class… The author’s command of literature and arguments is impressive.” • Sharryn Kasmir, Hofstra University“Szombati has written an outstanding text that addresses with theoretical sophistication and empirical rigor key sociological and political issues of our time… [This] is a work of great originality and courage.” • Douglas Holmes, Binghamton University

• List of maps and tablesForewordIvan SzelenyiPrefaceIntroductionChapter 1. Historic Contextualization: "Gypsies", "Magyars" and the StateChapter 2. Popular Racism in the Northeast: The Case of GyöngyöspataChapter 3. Redemptive Anti-Gypsyism: The Transposition of Struggles from the Social to the Political DomainChapter 4. Right-wing Rivalry and the Dual StateChapter 5. The Limits of Racist Mobilization: The Case of DevecserChapter 6. From Racism to Ultranationalism: Jobbik’s Transformation Through Ethnographic LensEpilogueReferencesIndex