An ethnic Hungarian born in communist Czechoslovakia, Jarábik has spent his life giving voice to minority opinions. Early in his career, he co-authored one of the first comprehensive studies of Roma populations in Slovakia and co-founded the Center for Legal Analysis at the Kalligram Foundation in Bratislava, lobbying for minority rights and anti-discrimination legislation.
He was an active participant in Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution and later worked as a political advisor and activist in Slovakia’s 1998 elections. He also lived and worked in the field during the so-called “Color Revolutions” in Yugoslavia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), and in Uzbekistan (2003), where he managed a human rights program.
Living in Ukraine between the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan pushed Jarábik to go beyond traditional analytical methods to understand what was happening in the country. Similarly, working in Belarus helped him better understand illiberalism and its underlying factors — now spreading westward from Eastern Europe.His time living and working in the Baltic States from 2012 to 2016 deepened his understanding of countries close to Russia and taught him to distinguish between actual and perceived threats to society.
