New special issue with Peripheral Debt members’ contributions

The theme section "Managing problem debt in Europe: Financialization, households, and debt apparatuses" co-edited by Irene Sabaté Muriel (University of Barcelona) and Marek Mikuš has just been published as part of the 101th issue of Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. In the editorial, Sabaté and Mikuš introduce the analytical category of "problem debt" to the anthropological and interdisciplinary literature on debt, in which it has been an important but insufficiently theorized concern. They also sketch how debtors, creditors and "debt apparatuses" manage problem debt in settings of advanced and peripheral financialization in Europe, which is explored in wide-ranging ways in the articles by Deana Jovanović, Henry van der Burgt and co-authors, Benjamin Schwarz, Balázs Gosztonyi, and Agnes Gagyi and Tamás Gerőcs. In his piece, Gosztonyi looks at Hungarian tabloids accounts of debtors with non-performing loans to show how they, unlike their counterparts elsewhere, tended to represent debtors sympathetically as people afflicted by hardship or victims of greedy creditors. The theme section is fully open access.