MAGMA · Making the good matter: An ethnography of decency in power for inclusive governance in Central and Eastern Europe
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2027-01-01 → 2029-06-30
- EU contribution
- €259,698
- Participants
- 3
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Project objective
MAGMA takes up a simple, urgent and understudied question: how can powerful people defend democracy? Institutional design alone does not suffice; implementing democratic values is always at risk, from bureaucratic drift (the ‘banality of evil’) and from anti-democratic currents. Today, the latter, colloquially MxGA (‘Make-X-Great-Again’), is coupling with new mass-communication technologies to erode safeguards, prompting EU-level responses. As its acronym signals, MAGMA searches for hidden resources that can help democracy maintain a firmer grasp vis-à-vis MxGA.The project examines what hinders and what enables elite central-state officials – i.e., top-tier civil servants and political representatives – to implement the ideals of freedom, equity and solidarity by exercising power with decency: i.e., restraint, fairness and compassion. It extends the ethnography of the state by connecting it with the anthropology of the good, anthropologies of resistance and phronetic social science. Rather than cataloguing failure, it is a hopeful, resource-seeking enquiry into the conditions and capabilities of those in power, a realm poorly understood despite its structural weight.The research is anchored in Roma health inclusion in Slovakia, pairing the Fellow’s long-term, trusted access to senior decision-makers with a high-stakes EU test of democracy implementation that too often fails, especially in the given region. The methods combine ethnographic interviews with directed auto-ethnography, moving from conceptual groundwork to fieldwork, leading to an explanatory framework. A follow-up, non-academic placement will probe translation.MAGMA’s pertinence lies in centring the understudied moral agency of elite officials, tackling a high-stakes EU inclusion agenda and delivering cues for fostering institutional decency under intensifying pressures. It also marks a career inflection, consolidating the Fellow’s move from applied medical anthropology to the ethnography of power.
Original text from CORDIS.
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Data: CORDIS, © European Union