Agnieszka Pasieka: Living right. Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe
Abteilung Kulturwissenschaften
Agnieszka
Pasieka is a sociocultural anthropologist. Her research focuses on issues of inequality, discrimination, and
social hierarchies. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on religious and ethnic minorities in Poland and a historically
oriented study of migration, class, and ethnicity in the Connecticut River Valley. Between 2015 and 2018, Agnieszka Pasieka
was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Institute of East European History. Currently, she is assistant professor
at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal). In 2024, she published her book Living
Right. Far-Right Youth Activities in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press).
Radical
nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. Living Right provides an in-depth account of the ideas
and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how
these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how
far-right ideas are understood and lived in ways that speak to a variety of experiences.
In this eye-opening
book, Agnieszka Pasieka draws on her own sometimes harrowing fieldwork among Italian, Polish, and Hungarian militant youths,
painting unforgettable portraits of students, laborers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and activists from well-off middleclass
backgrounds who have all found a nurturing home in the far right. Providing an in-depth account of radical nationalist communities
and networks that are taking root across Europe, she shows how the simultaneous orientation of these groups toward the local
and the transnational is a key to their success. With a focus on far-right morality that challenges commonly held ideas about
the right, Pasieka describes how far-right movements afford opportunities to the young to be active members of tightly bonded
comradeships while sharing in a broader project with global ramifications.
