About our Research Group: Hungary and the United Nations from 1945 till today
The Hungary and the UN Research Group was established on July 2nd, 2024, in order to study the relations between Hungary and the United Nations (UN). The group exits within the ELTE Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of History, which also provides the home and the main venue for the group’s meetings and events. The research group works under the leadership of Dr. Gusztáv D. Kecskés, research professor. The research group is supported by the ELTE Research Centre for the Humanities and the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, which also signed a cooperation agreement on October 24th, 2024 to institutionalize their joint commitment.
Both the international and the Hungarian public knows very little about the global normative, regulative and monitoring roles the United Nations that influence almost all walks of life nowadays from healthcare to nuclear disarmament and security. The goal of the research group is to explore this truly significant role of the UN with respect to Hungary through producing high-quality and impactful empirical research to both bridge this gap in the literature and inform the public in Hungary and beyond.
The Hungary and the UN Research Group currently has close to 70 members from various Hungarian and international higher education institutions and research centres (see the link for the list of our research fellows below). The research group holds annual conferences as well as produces different types of publications from monographs to special issues with research articles in English and in Hungarian covering a wide variety of issues, from peacekeeping to Hungary and the UNESCO.
The research group held its first annual conference in October 2025, and one of its first publications from 2025 explores two main questions: what impact did the decisions and regulations of the UN and its institutions have on specific research fields, such as Hungarian agriculture, culture or the medical field; and how did the Hungarian government and leadership contribute to UN decision-making on different issues. The literature on Hungary and the UN is both scares and outdated. Accordingly, the research group is eager to take advantage of and use a wide variety of primary sources to produce cutting-edge empirical research on these topics. This includes archival sources from the different Hungarian ministries between 1945-2014; archival and repository sources from specific UN institutions and the Secretariat; and other archival documents from the foreign services of the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Additionally, oral history interviews provide the research group with more clarity and empirical depth on relations between Hungary and the United Nations.
Lastly, as many of the topics studied by the research group are highly interdisciplinary, especially those of a contemporary nature, the research group also takes advantage of the different methods and approaches from various subfields of history, political science and legal studies.
