This new research project explores the dynamic nature of culture wars in Europe and Eurasia, looking at both domestic contexts and transnational actors, grassroots movements and ideological instrumentalization, and discusses how culture wars are reshaping definitions of belonging, citizenship, and moral order.
Culture wars were long seen as unique to the highly polarized U.S. political context. In his seminal work Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America, James Davison Hunter defines culture wars as cultural and social conflicts rooted in the moral and philosophical assumptions that order our lives. Outside the US, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa were the first regions of the world to face local versions of culture wars; these often occurred due to extensive interactions with U.S. actors—thereby confirming the transnationalization of culture wars and the birth of a new Global Right Wing, as studied by Clifford Bob—even if local context and actors agenda have remained the driving force.
Since then, the post-communist space of Europe and Eurasia (both former socialist countries and former Soviet republics) seems to have become a new hotspot for culture wars, and Western Europe has not been spared either. Contentious topics range from the classic abortion issue and the new flagship of LGBT+ rights to euthanasia, bioethics, medically assisted procreation, domestic violence, juvenile justice, climate change, and—since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic—vaccination and lockdown measures.
The Culture Wars in Europe and Eurasia is a series that seeks to provide an opportunity for scholars to touch upon some controversial societal issues that feature prominently in today’s contemporary politics–from sexual and reproduction rights to bioethical issues, migration policies, or interpretation of climate change. Many of these topics can be approached from both an academic or opinionated perspective, as scholars are also citizens, situated in their own political culture and philosophical beliefs. The series offers a platform for sharing both scholarly works and more opinion pieces on the nature of today’s culture wars, as well as on the constructed nature of this same notion of culture wars.
Download PDF Lützerath will remain. Even if the coal is eventually extracted, the name of the place will continue to be a powerful symbol of the courage and ingenuity of…
Download PDF This paper investigates the role of culture in the making of illiberal hegemony in Hungary from 2014 to early 2023, in particular the political project of engineering, institutionalizing,…
Download PDF The restrictive regulations and vaccine policies imposed in response to the COVID-19 virus sparked widespread ideological disagreements and controversies in many countries, and Hungary was no exception. These…
Download PDF Repeating Arguments… The entire discussion of identity, privileges, and discrimination is situated between two fiercely contested positions. On one side, there are those who identify and criticize existing…
Download PDF On November 28, 2021, the people of Switzerland voted on the so-called “Covid-19-Law,” established to retroactively legitimize the measures taken by the Swiss state to prevent the spread…
Download PDF Since 2018, Slovakia has witnessed unprecedented attacks on access to legal and safe abortion. Over the past five years, more than twenty bills have been introduced in the…
Download PDF The interpretation of the Orbán regime has become an important topic in the international press and academic literature over the past decade as a contemporary example of the…
Download PDF The COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and the increasingly prominent LGBTIQ* movements as well as growing political incentives for professionalized academic outreach have intensified debates on relations between…
Download PDF Since the 2010s, culture wars have increasingly become the language of political conflict in Central Europe (CE). The last presidential election in Poland and Slovakia, and polarized general…
Download PDF The “pro-life” movement is part of the extreme right that has gained momentum in the U.S. due to the Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade (1973),…
Download PDF In summer 2022, Slovenia became the first post-socialist country to introduce marriage equality, including the possibility of adopting children. This might have seemed sudden from afar, but it…
Download PDF “I propose to call it a performative sentence…it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just…
Download PDF Should the government help end the lives of people who are terminally ill? What about those who are not terminally ill? Everyone agrees that there is much at…
Download PDF In this essay, I explore how hegemonic discourses legitimize and normalize surrogacy by looking at three magazine articles: from a celebrity magazine, a business magazine, and an academic/literary…
Download PDF The conference on the Future of Europe (spring 2021 – spring 2022) launched by the European Union was a bottom-up participatory consultation. It was a one-year series of…
Download PDF Illiberal Regime-Building in Hungary Following a short tenure around the millennium, Viktor Orbán became the prime minister of Hungary again in 2010. Now the strongman of illiberalism, he…
Download PDF Questions of gender, sex, and sexuality have become major points of contention in the culture wars raging internationally. Sexual and reproductive rights, access to abortion, equality for same-sex…
Download PDF The purpose of this article is to give an overview of some of the pressures, obstacles and, at times, open attacks that create a – putting it in…
Download PDF This text argues for a problematization of the concepts of Critical Whiteness and related identity politics in the field of anti-racism. It aims to show that the dominant…
Download PDF The notion of Culture Wars—and, with it, the rise of illiberal populist regimes and political movements—is customarily mobilized by self-styled cosmopolitan, enlightened, truth-embracing, and assumedly progressive liberals who…
Download PDF One problem often associated with identity politics is "positional fundamentalism," the equating of social positions with epistemic possibilities and political dispositions. The criticism is that identity politics is…
Download PDF We1 undoubtedly live in polarized times. There are a host of issues on which opinions are sharply divided, with the opposing sides portraying each other’s opinion not only…
Download PDF As a researcher living in a semi-peripheral country, Hungary, I could not escape noticing that something was happening with “reproductive rights” globally, at least on the discursive level,…
Download PDF The framing of discourse on “cancel culture” in universities often casts student activists in the role of enemies of open, rational discourse. And it is true that students,…
Download PDF In 2017, the World Congress of Families (WCF), one of the leading transnational networks that opposes the concept of gender and LGBTQ+ rights, held its global conference in…
Download PDF Introduction In this paper, I argue that due to the traditional, heteronormative views prevalent in Uzbek culture, as well as normalized government repression of society as a whole,…
Download PDF Culture wars are often understood simply as the agenda of conservative forces. Much more frequently, however, they are conflicts with two sides. These two sides have differing compositions,…
Download PDF The current anti-abortion law in Poland is one of the harshest not only in Europe, but also in the world. Since 2020, when the Constitutional Court ruled abortion…
Download PDF Perhaps no statement is as foundational to Western feminism as “the personal is political.” In the early days of the women’s liberation movement, women were able—by sharing their…
Download PDF The German language is known for its word-monsters. Some of its words, however, have entered the dictionaries of other languages. Kulturkampf is one such term, even if it…
Download PDF The concept of culture wars is at once appealing and unsatisfactory on many counts. On the one hand, there is no denying that an increasing and antagonistic logic…
Download PDF Social and political psychology treats social relations within stable and long-standing democracies as the default context for human existence, while in fact political instability, social conflict, structural discrimination,…
Download PDF The European Union likes to present itself as an inclusive entity that strives to reduce socio-economic disparities between member states while preserving and celebrating their cultural differences. It…
Download PDF Germany has a long history of colonialism and racism in Eastern Europe. To this day, people who are perceived as “Eastern” face discrimination and exclusion. In research and…
Download PDF In summer 2021 the Slovak company Dedoles, which sells such basic clothing items as socks and underwear, presented its rainbow collection—a reference to Pride month and the LGBTIQ…
Download PDF Turkmenistan is one of the world’s most closed and authoritarian countries, where citizens’ rights and liberties are almost completely denied in practice. The government’s authoritarian grip extends to…
Download PDF Populism scholars cannot ignore the robust causal evidence on the disruptive political effects of economic insecurity and claim that economic factors play no role in populism. To beat…
Download PDF The battle against abortion, the rejection of same-sex marriage, and the promotion of homeschooling and traditional family models stands at the center of actor networks across countries, religious…
Download PDF The recent parliamentary elections in Hungary on April 3, 2022, were combined with a government-initiated referendum on four questions related to education about and media representation to minors…
Download PDF In a teenage focus group, I asked a question: “If a teenage girl gets pregnant from her teenage boyfriend, does it happen because of a lack of awareness…
Download PDF Since Azerbaijan’s independence in 1991, the issue of domestic violence has been a recurring subject of debate. Until recently, this topic was mostly discussed among government agencies, international…
Download PDF The manosphere has gained new impetus worldwide these last years. By manosphere we define a network of online communities who promote anti-feminist beliefs and encourage resentment or hatred…
Download PDF This is a short reflective note on culture wars centered around seven statements. It is largely based on the introduction to the special issue of Europe-Asia Studies co-written…
Download PDF Russia has been a prominent player in global culture wars. It positions itself as a defender of “traditional values” across the post-Soviet space and seeks to expand its…
Download PDF Cliff, your book The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics was one of the first looking at right-wing transnational activism. Until then, we were used…
