Agnieszka Pasieka: Living right. Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe
Department
of Cultural Studies
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.
