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Book Review. Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe. Peoples, Places and Identities, edited by Christopher Whitehead, Susannah Eckersley, Katherine Lloyd, and Rhiannon Mason (eds.) 2015 . Ashgate, Surrey

This mixed methods study from 2017 to 2018 documents the living conditions and Czech Roma mothers’ experiences of the education system. Based on a comparative analysis of quantitative survey data a...

Published online: 03 Jan 2017 Experiences of democratization, especially those outside core western democracies, have seen the explosion of different forms of religious expression in public and political life. After all, democratization is about opening up the socio-political sphere, and creating an equal playing field for the participation of various contenders and alternatives of a ‘good life’. At the same time, religious movements are usually among the best-organized contenders to articulate and pursue powerful visions of a good life. That inherited legacies of nation-state formation, and the resulting ‘traditions’ of each specific country, are often at odds with the egalitarian-universal principles underlying democratic inclusion of different contenders, however, complicates the application of values of religious freedom and equality. That religious alternatives themselves consist of ‘comprehensive’ and often exclusionary narratives, moreover, makes them a difficult, even if unavoidable, companion of democratic openings. Hence, democratizing polities have to walk a very fine line between accommodation and restriction of religion in order for citizens from different walks of life to perceive the state as a shared home for everyone. Such dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion hinge on broader institutional choices, which concern fundamental questions about who is to be included and excluded, under what arrangements, and with what results.

AbstractThis paper looks at the case of citizenship in Kosovo and argues that the mismatch between the idea of a ‘liberal’ state and the practice of group differentiation, on the one hand, and the socio-political reality that emerged in the post-war period, on the other, has resulted in a citizenship regime that is hierarchical. It aims to demonstrate how despite the legally enshrined promise of equality, differentiated citizenship, together with a political context defined by an ethnic divide and past structural inequalities, as well as uneven external citizenship opportunities, contributed to the emergence of hierarchical citizenship, in which some groups (communities), or ‘rights-and-duty-bearing units’, are more equal than the others.

This article addresses the public appeal of political actionism in today’s Russia through analysis of the political art of Pyotr Pavlensky. The research uses the methodological paradigm of biopower and biopolitics, as outlined by Michel Foucault and further critically developed by Giorgio Agamben, since it helps to better understand both the oppressive nature of the Russian state, and the protest art of Pavlensky. The article seeks to unpack the struggle for the human body that has started in Russia in recent years, with the state imposing its normalizing and regulatory mechanisms upon private lives and corporeal practices of individuals, and people’s responses by re-claiming their bodies, from an open public discussion of sexuality, domestic violence and gender equality, to the radical exposure of the body by artists like Pavlensky. As the argument goes, the centerpiece of political controversy is not just the battle for the human body, but a battle for sovereignty, defining the limits of state i...

Does citizenship facilitate access to employment and higher status jobs? Existing studies have produced mixed results across mostly single case studies in Europe and North America. To investigate whether this heterogeneity depends on varying institutional and socio-economic conditions, in this paper we analyse the labour market outcomes of immigrants who have naturalised in 13 West European countries. Our empirical analysis draws on data from the 2014 European Labour Force Survey Ad Hoc Module on immigrants. In order to cope with the selective nature of the naturalisation process, we employ a bivariate probit model that accounts for unobserved characteristics of naturalising immigrants. Our main results show a positive relationship across these destination countries between citizenship and the probability of employment, as well as between citizenship and occupational status, but only for immigrant men from developing countries. For women and for migrants from developed countries, we observe no significant differences between citizens and non-citizens. Liberalising the access to citizenship does not diminish the positive returns on employment from naturalisation. For immigrant men from developing countries there is evidence of a trade-off between easier access to citizenship and the returns on occupational status.

In a recent analysis of the (falsely) oppositional categories of the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘cosmopolitan’, Maximilian Forte argues that indigeneity ‘is a deeply current issue, which, over the past d...

Eastern Europe underwent one of the most dramatic economic and demographic changes in recent history with skyrocketing mortality rates in some countries during the 1990s. The case of Hungary among the post-socialist transition countries is puzzling for several reasons. Although the Hungarian transition has been often characterised as smooth and successful, a look at the human dimension of the transformation reveals large costs and a slow improvement. Based on the analysis of 29 articles we provide a systematic review of the empirical evidence about the social determinants of mortality in post-socialist Hungary establishing a hierarchy of causes. Socioeconomic position, mental health, social capital, alcohol consumption, stress, and social integration are the most important explanatory variables that received attention by the researchers. Although economic policies might have played a central role in the rise of mortality there is no empirical research on the political economy of health in Hungary. No critical analysis of post-socialism can be complete without assessing the human costs of economic transformation. Social scientists have much to learn from social epidemiologists who have designed robust methodologies and complex theoretical frameworks to analyse the political economic determinants of health.