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.