What forces are behind the rise of right-wing paramilitary groups in Central and Eastern Europe? How are they funded and what are the links between them? How are they shifting understandings of what it means to be patriotic?
These are some of the questions that the team of investigative journalists at VSquare sought to answer in a series of articles published this year on “Patriotism militarized” in the Central European Visegrád countries of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
“This is an overlooked, but very important, trend that says a lot about social changes in the region”, Wojciech Cieśla, head of Fundacja Reporterów, told the International Press Institute (IPI) during a recent interview in Warsaw. “We noticed it and decided to check what it looks like in different countries.”