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.

Employment

- since 2021: senior researcher and lecturer (permanent position), FU Berlin, Institute for East-European Studies

- 2020-2021: substitute professor of sociology at FU Berlin’s Institute for East-European Studies

- 2012-2020: researcher and lecturer at FU Berlin’s Institute for East-European Studies

(on parental leave from September 2014 to April 2015)

Education

- 2021: post-doctoral lecturing qualification (habilitation), FU Berlin

- 2011-12: Max Weber Post-Doctoral Fellow, EUI Florence

- 2006-11: PhD Amsterdam University, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Science (cum laude)

- 2003-05: Master of Arts (European Studies), Viadrina-University in Frankfurt/Oder

- 1999-2003: Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, National School of Political and Administrative Studies, Bucharest

Memberships and service for the profession

Member of the German Society for Sociology (DGS); the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE); the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR); Labour Sociology (ISA); British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES); Regional Studies Association (RSA)

Peer-reviewing for: World Development, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of Development Studies, International Sociology, Democratization, Finance and Society, New Political Economy, Land Use Policy, Political Geography, Sociologia Ruralis, Journal of Rural Studies, Journal of Industrial Relations, European Journal of Industrial Relations, Critical Policy Studies, Employee Relations, Economic and Industrial Democracy, Government and Opposition, Focaal Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, Nationalities Papers, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Társadalomtudományi Szemle, Sociologie Românească, Leviathan - Berliner Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft, New Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Journal of Central & East European Politics and International Relations, Routledge, Stanford University Press

Teaching

Yearly Classes on:

Since 2019 States, development, modernization

Since 2021: Research design and qualitative methods

Since 2012: Civil society and social movements

Since 2012: Post-communist market societies

Since 2016: Identity and radicalization, nationalism

Since 2019: Sociology of deviance

2013-15, 2020-21, 2022-25: Project courses (research project development)

Third-party funding

- 2022-2025, Lead Principal Investigator in “ENDURE: Inequalities, Community Resilience and New Governance Modalities in a Post-Pandemic World”, Funders Involved (via The Trans-AtlanticPlatform for Social Sciences and Humanities, T-AP): FAPESP (Brazil); AKA (Finland); MINCIENCIAS (Columbia); NCN (Poland); NSF (USA); HRZZ (Croatia); DFG (Germany); SSHRC (Canada); ESRC (UK); FRQSC (Quebec); total budget: EUR 1,5 mln

- 2021-2024, Principal Investigator in the Horizon 2020 program “De-Rad: Detect, Resolve, Integrate”; Budget for FU Berlin: EUR 283.000 (total budget: EUR 3 mln; Lead: Glasgow Caledonian University, Prof. Umut Korkut)

- 2021-2024 Main applicant for FU Berlin, together with A. Yakovlev (HSE Moscow), for the institutional partnership program of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (EUR 55.000, 2020-2023; program frozen following the sanctions against Russia)

- various small grants for conferences and research stays from the DFG (EUR 6.000, 2018), DAAD (EUR 7.000, 2012), Thyssen (EUR 4.000, 2013)

Selected courses taught at FU Berlin

• Capitalism in post-socialist Eurasia
• Modernization
• Civil Society
• Identity and Radicalization
• Qualitative Methods

Sociology

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

(2020, with Aron Buzogány) The Foreign Policy of Populists in Power: Contesting Liberalism in Poland and Hungary. Geopolitics, 26(5), 1442-1463.

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