The Historical Context and Impact of the Far-Right Revisionism - workshop organized by GIAS Fellow Tatyjana Szafonova and Senior Core Fellow Eszter Bartha

On 19-20 April 2023, the workshop “The Historical Context and Impact of the Far-Right Revisionism” was organized with the support of the IAS CEU and the CEU Democracy Institute. The main organizers of the workshop were GIAS Fellow Tatyjana Szafonova and Senior Core Fellow Eszter Bartha.

On the first day, a roundtable discussion took place, which brought together social anthropologists, sociologists, and historians to explore how to situate the socio-political contexts in which post-truth historical narratives operate and how to respond to the questioning of established historical narratives and historical methods. The discussion was followed by a concert of the “Turan Road Music” project, a result of collaboration of social anthropologist István Sántha with four musicians, Géza Fábri (cobza), Balázs Pándi (drums), Ernő Zoltán Rubik (keyboards) and Béla Ágoston (reeds).

The program of the second day addressed various issues depicting the multiple faces of right-wing revisionism, including the social context of the Kurultáj festivals in Hungary, the working of identity politics through the reworking of pagan traditions, the intertwining of class and gender in explaining the appeal of the far right and the “revision” of colonialism and colonial history. The last session was devoted to the study of labour and right-wing populism as well as the post-1989 revision (or negligence) of labour histories in the former state socialism countries.

The workshop participants also took part in a walking tour through Budapest visiting various sites that have been retouched by revisionist politics of past and contemporary regimes.

The papers of the workshop will be published in a Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe in 2024.