In this conversation, Bernadett Sebály discusses the inception and development of the online database of protest events in Hungary, 1989–2010, entitled Küzdelmeink története, or “The Story of Our Struggles”; its use in pedagogical settings for students, activists, teachers, and everyday citizens; and the importance of its place between activism and scholarly research in the Hungarian illiberal context.
Bernadett Sebály is a doctoral candidate at the Central European University’s Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Relations in Vienna, Austria, as well as a Research Affiliate at the CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest, Hungary. For the past decade, she has worked at the grassroots, national, and international levels to build strong civil society and community organizations. She co-founded and organized A Város Mindenkié—The City Is For All—which is a multi-class alliance of the house poor in Budapest, and coordinated the Civilizáció Coalition, a Hungarian network of civil society organizations, which were brought together during a period of repressive government measures in Hungary. She’s worked with Amnesty International, the Minority Rights Group International, and helped design and run a community organizing program in Hungary with the Civil College Foundation. She’s on the board of the European Community Organizing Network as well.
Cody James Inglis: Bernadett’s research focuses on the policy impact of social movements. Her dissertation research focuses on how different social movements’ strategies to obtain constituent and state power have shaped those social movements’ ability to assert their values and policies. She examines this by comparing movement strategies in Hungarian housing struggles between 1987 and 2024.
Our conversation today will focus on the database of protest events in Hungary that Bernadett and her team have built, entitled Küzdelmeink története, or The Story of Our Struggles. The project covers the period between 1989 and 2010 and examines protest events in the context of newer social movements in Hungary during the 1980s, following the change of regime in 1989, and onward to the election of the second Orbán government in 2010.
So, Bernadett, I’d like to start by going to the beginning. What were the origins of the project? How did the project come to be?
Bernadett Sebály: The Story of Our Struggles project grew out of my long-time cooperation with the School of Public Life, which is an activist training center in Hungary, where I’ve had trainings since 2014.
And in these trainings—and really through our work in several civil society organizations—our recurring experience was that there’s not enough knowledge of the history of past struggles. And I’m not talking in historic terms here, in terms of 50 years or 100 years. What we saw is that there’s limited knowledge about the post-transition struggles: so, the last 30 years, which are so formative regarding how we think about democracy and how we think, how we act in our democracy. And, of course, there is a lot of research out there—which may be known by historians, political scientists—but for some reason they did not become part of our mainstream knowledge and therefore they have limited capacity to provide us with a narrative that can guide us.
And this is problematic because when we don’t have a narrative, when we don’t have an overarching narrative of our struggles, we don’t see how our work fits into larger social justice work; we might have a misperception of our role because we might think that, oh, we are the first ones who have done this, whereas there were several other groups who have gone through the same struggles and there are patterns repeating throughout history; and it is problematic also because we have limited ability to learn from our mistakes, learn from other people’s mistakes, and also draw on their successes. So, in the School of Public Life, we thought that, okay, we would like to provide tools for activists that can make the history of social movements more accessible, with which they can construct or reconstruct or even expand extant narratives of their social movements.
So, the seeds were sown, but we needed substance to make it happen. And the substance came in the form of a protest event analysis done by Professor Béla Greskovits from the Central European University, and Professor Jason Wittenberg from the University of California, Berkeley. They did a very comprehensive protest event analysis covering the period of 1989 and 2010, and they published their conclusions and results in a research paper in 2016. I’ve known this research for a long time, and it was inspiring for me: it inspired my work, it inspired my research. But I did not see the data set because they did not publish it. So, in 2021, when I really dove deep into my own research about housing movements, I reached out to them and requested the data set to see, first of all, what protest events and movement organizations were active in the housing movement.
And when I saw the database, it was literally like a window into an unknown story of Hungarian people, teachers, nurses, people with disabilities, Roma people, people belonging to the LGBTQ+ community, farmers, conservative groups, who were fighting for what they thought was their justice. So, I was like, “Oh my god, this is a treasure that cannot just sit on my computer after having been sitting on another person’s computer.” So, I would really like to make it public, public in a way that is user-friendly and that is accessible, for activists, researchers, and educators. So for three very different target groups.
I went back to the School of Public Life, we discussed it, and we thought that this is the time to make this happen. We had some money for the creation of the website, but for nothing else. So, the first round of data, the period between 1989 and 1994, was produced by me on a voluntary basis. But we thought that this moment is not going to return, so we have some momentum to make this happen.
In the meantime, I took the project into the CEU Democracy Institute with the support of Professor Violetta Zentai, and together we gradually built up a research team who, along the way, have produced the data. At the same time, the School of Public Life was building up a team of trainers who developed a method we call the “Movement Timeline Method,” with which activists can construct their movement’s timeline with the help of the data coming from The Story of Our Struggles Movement Database.
To link back to your question, Cody, this makes this research an engaged research because in this project research becomes an orientation toward social change, and it happens in collaboration with people, people who usually are the subject of the research here, they are part of the production of the research. As a result of these two pillars—the research pillar and the activism pillar—The Story of Our Struggles really becomes a living database, which is used, which is out there and which is accessible.
C: It’s a really fascinating project. Also in part because of the time in which it appeared. So, to have it, let’s say, generated by these two pillars that you speak of: you have this impulse pillar from the activist side, social movement side, the civil society side. But then, on the other hand, as you stated, this idea that somehow there was a piece of research which really gave an initial impulse to link further research endeavors with the activist side.
I wanted to know a little bit more about that immediate context. So, the database was generated in the early 2020s. This is a very contemporary project. It’s a project which is still being updated and worked on. I wonder whether you can say more about this context of the early 2020s, and why it’s important that such a project is being published now.
B: I can really just reiterate myself that the impulse of this project was our experience that there’s not enough knowledge out there about the history of our struggles. Both researchers and both activists who want to test old knowledge of civil society, of our understanding of civil society, and who want to generate new knowledge of our understanding of civil society in the region, they need more tools, new tools, and this project wants to contribute to this purpose.
At the current stage, The Story of Our Struggles covers the period of 1989 and 2010, as you said in the introduction, and we would like to extend it temporally, but currently we could produce data until 2010. But, I think to cover this period is extremely relevant under the illiberal regime of Viktor Orbán, where
we tend to focus more on the injustices happening under this regime, and we tend to forget that there was a lot of injustice, that there was a lot of flawed policymaking, there were plenty of political lies before 2010,
and there is a lot of great research that explains how this contributed to the emergence of the Orbán regime or the illiberal regime in 2010.
So, I think this project, as much as the period it covers is the outcome of pragmatic reasons—because we are building on an extant protest event analysis—it is very crucial to reflect on the previous period that led to the emergence of the illiberal regime and juxtapose that with what happened before and after 2010.
C: It’s interesting to think a bit about the roots of the problem, from before 2010. Actually, because your database is fixed between the change of regime in 1989 and 2010, it also made me think a bit about the predecessors of this kind of style of writing a history of a certain movement. Mainly, there was a big—in Hungary at least—historiographic effort to write a history of the workers’ movement, the Hungarian workers’ movement specifically.
It took place in the 1950s, which makes it also, in that context, a very loaded idea of having a history of the Hungarian workers’ movement being written in this transitional period, with its origins in the Rákosi regime, and then after 1956 into the Kádár regime. But what’s interesting are the actual source texts, which were collected and produced as part of a collected documents set—but it focuses only on the labor movement.
Your work, by comparison, tries to expand beyond the workers’ movement as such, and you include many other, different forms of social movements: from the housing movement to the green movement, from the movement of farmers, peasants, the agrarian movement, even to the prisoners’ movement and different struggles for healthcare and education. It seems that your project is actually trying to offer a much wider reading of what social movements are.
I wondered whether you could say a bit about… Maybe it’s not so self-evident, actually, for many people, that social movements aren’t just to be identified with the workers’ movement and labor movement, but include the labor movement and extend far beyond it as well, with many different classes involved, many different social perspectives.
So, I wanted to engage you on this topic: Why expand it to a much broader field of different social struggles, which are not identified with the workers’ movement?
B: The term ‘social movement’ has been used very widely and very differently, and it also penetrated in ordinary public speech. So I think it is helpful to clarify what we mean by social movements in this project. I was also using the concept ‘civil society’, so it might be helpful to contextualize them together.
There’s a school which defines ‘associational work,’ ‘civil society work,’ as a moment of social movements. And there is a school which defines ‘social movements’ as an integral part of civil society. I belong to the latter school. What I mean by ‘social movement’ is how Mario Diani in 1992 defined a social movement: A social movement is a network of organizations, groups, and individuals which engage in political or cultural conflict with some sort of common identity. So, this is, I think, a very helpful approach to think differently about our civil society in this region, to see the connections between different organizations, struggles, as opposed to seeing them as separated civic organizations running their own, working on their own issues. So, in this sense, it is not surprising to call the LGBTQ people’s struggles, the Roma people’s struggles, and all the other struggles that we list on the website—the women’s struggles—as social movements, as social movement struggles.
C: One topic which came up in your answer which also occurred to me is this search for a common identity. There’s something shared between all these movements, which is the Hungarian national frame. So, the framing of the project is very interesting, because the sort of translation of ‘Küzdelmeink története’ is the ‘History of Our Struggles’, but the ‘Our’, because it’s rendered in Hungarian, sort of implicitly means it’s a sort of Hungarian frame. I wonder whether you’d push back. Do you see this as just a Hungarian national project? Or do you see that it actually has networks which go well beyond the Hungarian national frame, even rendered within Hungary itself, or in Hungarian minority communities in neighboring countries? I mean, do you see this as leading to some sort of larger or regional East Central European, Central European, Eastern European project? Does it point in that direction, or is this really a very direct Hungarian story?
B: This is a very interesting question, Cody, and I haven’t thought about this aspect very much before. The ‘Story of Our Struggles’ means to me, the pronoun ‘our’ means to me, that it is our struggle, it is ‘we, the people’s’ struggle.
And ‘we, the people’ are all sorts of constituencies who exist within the boundaries of a state, who have very different interests, who might have conflicting political views, conflicting demands, or overlapping demands, whose struggles sometimes collide, or whose struggles sometimes reinforce each other.
But this is, this is ‘we, the people’, and this is our struggle. To this struggle, obviously, belong those people’s struggles who live in this country, but are not necessarily Hungarians. If you look up the protests and protest events on The Story of Our Struggles website, you will find some protests of the migrant community, and in this sense, to me, ‘Our Struggles’ also means the struggles of people who live in this region, who live in this region as ethnic Hungarians, who live in this region as other Eastern Europeans. As much as it has a Hungarian scope, in the future it really should have an Eastern European scope, and that is our imagination.
Having said that, there are two long-term goals of this project. One is to extend the project temporally. We would like to finish the protest event analysis until the current time. It would be great to extend it to the past as much as it’s possible. It’s an immense work, plus each decade requires a different approach to protest event analysis since there are different resources available, the level of reliability of these resources are also different from decade to decade. Right now, we have a great project plan involving human resources and machine resources, by means of which we could conduct the post-2010 protest event analysis, for which we don’t have the data yet.
And the other long-term goal of the project is to extend The Story of Our Struggles geographically. The Greskovits–Wittenberg protest event analysis was conducted as part of a larger research, which also produced similar data about Poland. Theoretically, we have the data between 1989 and 2010 about Poland, and we have now the infrastructure and the method to make it accessible in a user-friendly way. So, literally what we only need now is the energy, the time, and the resources to find the research colleagues in Poland or in other countries who would like to engage with this purpose, with the goals of this mission, and work together on it.
C: It would be fascinating to see a Polish–Hungarian connection, but then have this replicated all across East Central Europe. I think for someone who’s reading it maybe from the outside, you get the impression very quickly that the framing and the issues look very similar in the East Central European neighborhood. And really any case between… not just 1989 and 2010, but one could even stretch back to the late nineteenth century, to the origins of the labor movement and the origins of the women’s movement, and go forward into the future. These are very longstanding social movements that have very rich and deep roots, let’s say, in the region. It’s not just an ephemeral phenomenon, but different types of social movements in East Central Europe are prevalent, are very contemporary, but also have long histories behind them.
It’s a really fascinating project. And one of the things that caught my eye when I was looking through all of the different entries is that, on many of them, you also provide a historical background. So, for example, with the different agrarian movements—this really caught my eye—there’s a link at the bottom which takes you to a digital source about the history of agrarian movements in Hungary. So already you have a very interesting temporal play where, even though the focus is from 1989 and afterward, you do have this very sensitive reflexivity, let’s say, in the process of showing to the audience that this is not just a contemporary ephemeral phenomenon, but that this really has deeper roots. And maybe this is also part of the strong resources that these movements have in the first place: it’s the fact that they have some knowledge of their own histories; or, if they don’t, then this is providing them with some of those resources.
I wanted to ask you a little bit about the applicability of the project. You’ve done a lot of work in teaching yourself, and you use a lot of critical pedagogical methods as you teach. I’m wondering about how such a resource can be used in a classroom or in a training environment, in educational or pedagogical environments construed quite broadly. So not at the university necessarily, but perhaps also. How could such a digital database be used?
B: So, together with the School of Public Life, we developed a method we call ‘Movement Timeline Construction’, and this was really the outcome of experimentation. The roots of this date back to a workshop we had in January 2020, when we wanted to teach activists about the story of the last 30 years, and that was our first shot to actually try to do it and experiment with teaching methods, how you can cover 30 years of history and politics in a student-friendly way.
At that time, I hadn’t had access yet to the Greskovits–Wittenberg protest event analysis. I took my own collection of protest events to the workshop, and what we did was that we gave out little snippets of the protest events, and also little snippets of the most important political events happening in the three decades we were covering.
We divided the group into three subgroups. We pulled together a long line of tables and we asked the three groups to build a timeline with the help of those little cards and try to make sense of the story they see through the protest events and reflect on how the movements actually reacted to the crucial policy changes and political events in Hungarian politics, what might explain their successes, what might explain their failures.
And this was the first shot at building a movement timeline. Based on this, the School of Public Life developed what we call now the Movement Timeline Project using Movement Timeline Construction, which is very similar to what I described to you, except that the trainers invite activists from the same movement to their workshops. So, they work with their own movements instead of covering a lot of different streams of movement activities at the same time. And now that we have The Story of Our Struggles website, we can really provide a decent, concise, one-paragraph summary of the protest events the participants work with. The participants who come to this Movement Timeline Construction workshop also contribute with their own experience, so by the end of the workshop participants share their own narrative which they constructed during the workshop about the particular decade they were working on, and eventually participants put together collectively their movement narrative.
I was using the word ‘activist’, but this is an excellent approach for teachers who use cooperative teaching techniques in their social science classes, in secondary school classrooms. And this is also perfect for other educators, other trainers who work with civic organizations, activists, professionals, civil society workers. The School of Public Life is willing to provide these workshops. They are also willing to teach people who are interested to run their own workshops. So I really encourage those trainers, educators, teachers, or researchers who would like to learn how to run such a workshop and reach out to the School of Public Life’s great trainers.
C: I wanted to ask you, in connection with this, to what extent do you have people from all these different social movements with whom you’re in contact, to what extent do you hear back from them? About the way in which they’ve used the database? Is this something that people in different social movements use for their own internal organizing work, or is it something that they reflect on, that they use to conceptualize where they are in the history of their own social movement, or compared to other social movements?
B: I hope they do. One source of feedback is what we receive during the workshops, and the other source of feedback we receive in random conversations with the folks. The feedback we’ve received is very positive. People say that they have a lot of revelatory experiences, revelatory moments by seeing the contours of their movement’s history, the contours of their movement’s narrative. But we haven’t done an impact assessment of this work yet. Hopefully later we will, and we will have more systematic feedback on our work, but so far what we heard is very positive. So it seems like it was worth putting the effort into it.
C: You said something during your response which made me smile, this idea that somehow the tools that you’ve prepared through this database have really been a revelation for those who use them. And I think that this is very important: on one level, at the sort of research/academic level, among scholars, among academics, I think few things can seem like a revelation because everyone likes to think about having a certain level of expertise. But really what’s fascinating about this project is that you’ve done something that traditional social history or traditional labor history has yet to do, which is to show that there’s, in your words, a timeline of these social movements which continues into the present, and that these are conducted not just in parallel with each other, but in interaction with each other. I think this use of digital tools… to use a sort of key phrase in the humanities right now, a ‘digital humanities’ approach to this project is really a revelation. You really have a good visual but also a good temporal rendering of these problems, and with the filtering mechanisms on the website, you can really see that there’s a lot of interaction between what on first glance would seem like not necessarily interacting social movements: there’s much more interaction.
B: Yeah, I do hope that this great resource bank will be a revelatory experience for those researchers who would like to test old knowledge and generate new knowledge about Eastern Europe, about social movements in Eastern Europe. I think we are still lacking data. There has been a lot of great research which challenge the old views of weak civil society in Eastern Europe, which if you really look at this data, you see that that postulate should be reassessed. So, I do hope that our project will be a great resource bank for researchers as well who are looking for a new angle on how to reflect on civil society development and who need cutting-edge data to reassess what we already know.
