Adam Mayer

Research Area 2

Stay at EEGA: September 2018 – February 2019

I am currently Assistant Professor in Politics and International Relations at University of Kurdistan Hewler, Iraqi Kurdistan.

My Research Project: “A Case of Alter-Globalization During the Cold War: The Intellectual History of State Socialist Hungary in Africa, and Africa’s Presence in Socialist Hungary.”
I earned my PhD degree in Contemporary International History at Eotvos Lorand University Budapest in 2015 with the dissertation “A History of Ideas in Nigeria – The Marxist Challenge,” after having taught and researched at American University of Nigeria for three years. A modified version of my dissertation was published by Pluto Press London in 2016, under the title Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria, where Eastern European ideological and technical transfers were already discussed at length. With CAS, I am now conducting a study that explores the life narratives of four “state socialist” Hungarian expatriates in Africa during the Cold War (three of them published heavily redacted memoirs of the experience), mirrored by the life narratives of four African students who attended university in pre-1989 Hungary and chose to stay on as professionals in the country. Hungary’s near-lack of state level political connections south of the Sahara prior to transition co-existed with multifaceted personal, professional, intellectual, business, and ideological transfers and mobility in both directions. I also continue to study the larger Eastern European impact on West Africa and Nigeria, and specifically also Nigerian radicalism, to give context to my case study.