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Paper short abstract

Our paper aims to understand the various strategies of civic solidarity initiatives from co-optation through maneuvering to resistance, and how these strategies influence their impact in local society and their position in the wider social and political environment.

Paper long abstract

The background for this paper is our research on transformative solidarity, which uses interviews and ethnographic methods to explore civic solidarity across six municipalities in Hungary. In this paper, we will focus on civic groups that operate educational programs outside of state schools to address the disadvantages faced by children from deprived backgrounds, most of whom are Roma. We will first examine the operation and impact of tutoring centres (in Hungarian: tanoda) from the perspective of how they navigate a space largely defined by state-controlled resources. The tanodas are professional civil organizations, most of whose founders and members are non-Roma, and, in rare cases, Roma and non-Roma together. Since the target group consists largely of Roma families and their children, another key element is their relationship with institutions of ethnic representation and self-government. Understanding the variations in civic and ethnic solidarity relations is the second goal of our paper. The third type of relationships to be examined are horizontal relationships through which the civic tutoring centres are included into local society on the one hand and into a trans-local network of civic and professional organizations on the other. The interaction among the three types of relationships (toward the state, toward ethnic peers, and toward civil society) is the final question of the study, which we would like to answer from the perspective of the sustainability and impact of solidarity on the one hand and the shrinking civil space in autocracies on the other.