A small Central European country with a population of 9,877,365 (Eurostat, 2015), Hungary has become a place where narratives of nation and migration are rewritten. For the past three years, there has been an increase in the number of asylum seekers in Hungary, rising from 2155 applications for asylum in 2012 to 42,775 in 2014 (Eurostat, 2015), a situation that stirred the political scene, the media, and society, eliciting mixed responses. This paper aims to analyse two conflicting realities: first, the unwelcoming strategies, policies and attitudes towards asylum seekers and refugees in Hungary, in an overall framework of "unwanted migrants", driven by political forces and supported by a passive response from the general public; secondly, the very recent changes in the response of civil society and civilians towards receiving and helping asylum seekers who enter Hungary, by organizing social media groups with thousands of volunteers, interpreters, doctors and donors providing direct assistance to asylum seekers arriving at the train stations in Budapest and at main cities in Hungary as well as in reception camps. The analytical tool used in this article is the Foucauldian analysis of govemmentality and modernity by Jonathan Xavier Inda (2005), according to which human beings are opened to political programming but at the same time, as subjects, they have the potential to respond to the instrumentalization of their conduct, to contest it or to rebel against it.

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immigration policy refugee democracy Hungary human rights asylum seeker social media