CES Visiting Scholar Béla Filep presents his new book on "The Politics of Good Neighborhood: State, Civil Society and the Enhancement of Cultural Capital in East Central Europe."
Analyzing neighborly relations in multicultural societies, Filep's forthcoming book develops a concept of good neighborhood and argues that cultural capital in various forms is the determining variable in building good-neighborly relations. This work breaks new ground by offering a conceptual integration of different, mutually interdependent forms of capital: intercultural capital, cross-cultural social capital and multicultural capital. These forms of capital are linked to different educational and cultural policies of the state as well as to civil society involvement at different levels of implementation. Although grounded in extensive fieldwork in culturally diverse border regions of East Central Europe, the concept is not region-specific and its rich theoretical base means it can be usefully adapted and applied to other contexts.
