New book chapter

Marek Mikuš's chapter entitled "Victims, patriots and middle class: the (un)deservingness of debtors in post-credit boom Croatia" was just published as part of the collection Ethnographies of deservingness: unpacking ideologies of distribution and inequality (Berghahn Books, 2022) edited by Jelena Tošić and Andreas Streinzer.

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Zagreb and secondary sources, the chapter explores the ways ways in which Croatian debtor activists and their opponents represented troubled debtors as deserving or undeserving of public assistance. The claims to debtors' deservingness were made on the basis of their status as victims (in either legal or humanitarian sense) or their belonging to other social categories, such as war veterans or the middle class. The analysis stresses the embedding of the discourses of (un)deservingness in actors‘ political projects, popular common sense, and hegemonic narratives and social coalitions. More information about the edited collection is available here.