Mihai Varga is a senior research fellow in sociology at the Eastern Europe Institute, Freie Universität Berlin. He was a Max Weber Fellow in 2011-2012 and holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam (2011) and a post-doctoral degree (Habilitation, 2021) from the FU Berlin. His research focuses on economic crises and their political and socio-economic consequences. He has published on poverty and World Bank-inspired anti-poverty reforms, trade unions responses to worker protests and austerity, and on the rise of right-wing forces preceding or following the financial crisis of 2007–8.

Please click below for an overview of all my publications:

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0278-7145

Representative publications

On market reforms and their socio-economic effects:

(2023) Poverty as Subsistence. The World Bank and Pro-Poor Land Reform in Eurasia (Stanford UP)

(2020) Poverty reduction through land transfers? The World Bank's titling reforms and the making of "subsistence" agriculture, online first in World Development Vol. 135, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105058

On the illiberal Right: 

(2022, with Aron Buzogány) Two Faces of the ‘Global Right’: Revolutionary Conservatives and National-Conservatives, Critical Sociology 48(6), 1089-1107, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F08969205211057020

(2021) The return of economic nationalism to East Central Europe: Right‐wing intellectual milieus and anti‐liberal resentment. Nations and Nationalism 27(1), 206-222, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nana.12660

(2019, with Katharina Bluhm, eds.)  New Conservatives in Russia and East Central Europe. London: Routledge