“Law and/or Humanity”: The Racial Politics of Squatting in Post-Transition Budapest

Abstract

This paper documents the application of private property logics to social housing in Hungary. It achieves this through a discourse analysis of public media and various district government newsletters published between 1994 and 2000 in the lead-up to the passage of anti-squatting legislation known as Lex Juharos. As I aim to demonstrate, the dehumanisation of Roma through anti-squatting discourse was crucial in the expansion of private property logics to the social housing system. Drawing on recent scholarship at the intersection of racial capitalism and critical property studies, I develop the concept of racial governmentality to account for the shifting norms of proprietorship germane to the Hungarian context that condition the citizen-subject to the racialised violence of displacement necessary for the functioning of a capitalist housing market. As I show, the state mobilised multiple racial governmentalities, namely the dog-whistle and surveillance, to facilitate social housing's commodification.