Andrea Pető

Pető researches gender and has become a figure in gender studies for Central and Eastern Europe.[11][12] She is particularly interested in examining political extremism and has analyzed both Nazi and Stalinist persecutions and their effects on society through the lens of gender.[11] For example, her award-winning 2003 Napasszonyok és holdkisasszonyok (Sun Ladies and Moon Maidens) examined the paradox of politically conservative women. In traditional Hungarian society, politics was a man's domain, but by supporting conservative values, women were able to gain power within the masculine system. She built on the theme in the 2014 work, Political Justice in Budapest after World War II (originally published in 2012 in Hungarian), written with Ildikó Barna, which examined cases brought before the people's tribunal and their impact on post-war Jewish identity. Many of the cases tried challenge the collective memory of the period that the Jewish population used the courts to exact revenge for war atrocities. They found that a majority of the cases, which typically dealt with Nazi collaboration or theft of Jewish property, ended in acquittal.[12][13] Examined evidence showed that the authorities adhered to a policy of avoiding even the term Jewish. Their analysis also showed that despite perceptions that the courts were dominated by men with a mob mentality, there was high participation by women both as accusers and accused. In addition, they found that women who supported traditional roles for society, typically received lighter sentences.[14]

In her 2018 work, Elmondani az elmondhatatlant a nemi erőszak története Magyarországon a II. világháború alatt (Speaking of the Unspeakable: The Story of Sexual Violence in Hungary During World War II), Pető examines wartime sexual violence.[15] Her analysis dismisses the easy answer of male aggression or punishment of otherness, noting that it was not simply invaders who raped and plundered Hungarian women during the war. Pető's evaluation confirmed that ethnicity was not a driving factor, but that the increased levels of rapes were driven by alcohol consumption, lax military discipline, and "the fact that the occupying Soviet army fell outside of Hungarian [legal] jurisdiction".[16] She documented that women soldiers participated in the sexual violence and that their participation had largely been erased from the collective memory of the period largely because of the taboo of male rape.[17] Continuing the theme of the invisibility in the historical narrative, her work The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War explores how and why the perpetrators of the Massacre at 64 Csengery Street on 15 October 1944 became prominent or invisible. Pető argues that the manipulation of the memories of the event paved the way for the re-emergence of far right movements in the twenty-first century.[18][19]

Pető visited Novi Sad, Serbia in 2003 to promote her book on the history of women's organizations which operated in Hungary between 1945 and 1951. While she was there, she witnessed a feminist walk which followed a map giving locations where important women lived, women's associations operated, and women's monuments stood, and decided to create a similar walk for Budapest. Research was required, as women's associations had been barred by the communist regime beginning in 1945 and few monuments to women exist in the city. Pető uses the tours to serve as both a teaching method and activism, recognizing that monuments and memory are a reflection of politics and power relationships. Her tours inspired students to make a similar map of lesbian spaces in 2017, using the records of the Labrisz Lesbian Association to locate important landmarks to the community. Pető has also voiced opposition to "right to be forgotten" policies in the European Union, when they have to do with global events, such as the Holocaust and war crimes.[9][20]

Pető's work on political extremism has been challenging since the 2010 election of Viktor Orbán as Prime Minister of Hungary. His conservative stance has limited academic freedom, curtailed freedom of the press, eroded judicial independence and attempted to control public institutions and non-governmental organizations.[21] Pető argues that by replacing diverse organizations that represented broad perspectives of different social sectors, the government created organizations which imposed specific identity requirements upon participants to receive funding. Following, they created research institutions peopled by those who ignored scientific protocols so that findings produced the narrative desired by the state, and eliminated independent publishing houses.[22] The illiberal democracy which has emerged has been strongly criticized by Pető. She has written for newspapers and magazines about the curtailment of women's rights, including the attempts to roll back abortion services which were first legalized in Hungary in 1945 in response to war-time sexual violence.[16][23]

Anti-immigration policies of the government led to rising xenophobia and caused backlash against immigrants and refugees in the country. As a response to government inaction, the Central European University staff and students collected funds and opened their doors to the refugees fleeing to Hungary from Serbia since 2015. [20] In 2018, the Central European University was forcibly barred from operating in Budapest and relocated to Vienna.[21] In 2021, in response to a plan to reduce qualifications for teacher training and a censorship request to remove comments critical of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education in an upcoming article, Pető resigned her position on the Hungarian Accreditation Committee, on which she had served since 2018.[2][21]