Authors

Jitka Kralova¹;  ¹ UCL SSEES, UK

Discussion

In the Czech Republic, poverty and social inequality have clear spatial dimensions. Following the capitalist transition, the economic restructuring and uneven development have left certain regions behind. In those spaces, inhabitants have since the transition been experiencing dwindling public infrastructure, declining living standards and an upsurge of various poverty industries. In the broader liberal discourse (in both media and politics), those regions have continued to be portrayed as problematic zones, responsible for most of the country’s socio-economic and political ills. 

Politically speaking, such ‘regions’ have been increasingly discussed in relation to the so-called populist threat. In various analyses of electoral results, they are clearly marked apart from the metropolitan areas in terms of their ‘troublesome’ voting preferences. Time after time, voters from the regions are portrayed as lacking political agency and sophistication, as they are seen to be making their political choices based on affect and institutional dependencies which have been carried through from the socialist past into the present. 

My contribution is based on my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among debtors living in one of such de-industrializing regions in the Czech Republic. I want to consider the effects that the widely held negative perceptions of the region have on the identity formation, the lived reality and politics of its inhabitants. Thinking through concepts of abandonment and economic hardship as experienced by my interlocutors, I want to discuss how the reproduction of socio-economic and political hierarchies is aided by specific imaginings of ‘regions’ and their features.