The Environment and Democracy Work Group and the De- and Re-Democratization (DRD) Workgroup of the CEU Democracy Institute cordially invite you to their seminar.
If you would like to attend, please register here.
Please note that the event is not open to the press.
The ongoing mainstreaming of the far right has allowed such actors to engage with a range of topics, including the environment. Beyond the ideologically narrow "eco-fascism", the far right today crafts its environmental agenda by borrowing from a broad pool of right-wing ideologies and variants: conservatism, nationalism and populism. But "far right ecologism" - the ideological "response" of the far right to environmental issues and the climate crisis, extends well beyond the far right itself, operating as a set of talking points in mainstream politics and environmental circles. This presentation will look at how far-right ecologism operates both as a set of ideas developed by the far right by looking at the cases of V4 countries and also how this ideology permeates mainstream environmentalism around Europe.
Speaker:
Balša Lubarda is the Head of Research at Damar Institute in Montenegro. He is the author of FAR-RIGHT ECOLOGISM: Environmental Politics and the Far-Right in Hungary and Poland (Routledge, 2023). He was previously a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, University of California, Berkeley (United States) and the Head of the Ideology Research Unit at the Far-Right Analysis Network (previously Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right). Lubarda obtained his PhD from CEU in December 2021 Summa Cum Laude, after conducting ethnographic research of far-right environmentalists in Eastern Europe. His works on environmental theory, energy politics, far-right activism and political ideologies in Eastern Europe were published in top-tiered journals in the field of environmental sociology and politics, such as Nature Climate Change, Environmental Values, Environmental Politics, Sociologia Ruralis, Journal of Language and Politics and Environmental Education. He also serves as a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme, and received the Award for the Most Promising Young Montenegrin Scientist (2021).
Read his co-authored article on the topic published in our Authlib project here.
Discussant:
Aron Buzogany is Assistant Professor at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU). He has been an Austrian Marshall Fund Fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS and previously held positions at the Freie Universität Berlin and Yale University, among other institutions. Buzogany’s work is on policy making in the European Union, with a particular focus on politics in Eastern Europe and environmental and energy policy.
Chair:
Stephen Stec is Senior Research Fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute leading the Environment and Democracy Workgroup. A lawyer by profession, he is widely published in several fields and has taught courses in CEU’s Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy for more than 20 years. From 1998 to 2018 he was Head of the Environmental Law Programme of the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe, where, inter alia, he took part in the negotiation, drafting and implementation of several MEAs and provided interim secretariat services to the Sava River Commission. He is an elected representative of the Scientific and Technological Community Major Group of UNEP.