Mihai Varga
Mihai Varga (PhD 2011 in sociology, University of Amsterdam) is a senior researcher at the Institute for East-European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. His current research focuses on the political economy of agricultural reforms and of infrastructural development in the wider Black Sea region. His latest book is Poverty as Subsistence. The World Bank and Pro-Poor […]
Buzogany, A. & Varga, M., 2025. Breaking the rural underdevelopment trap? Eastern Enlargement, agricultural policy and lessons for Ukraine. Journal of European Public Policy, 1-22.
Abstract: This article examines the lessons that the European Union’s Eastern Enlargement and the rural transitions it encouraged in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) hold for an enlarging EU and for Ukraine. Rural development policies in CEE were marked by institutional monocropping and a depoliticized approach to market building. Over two decades later, the EU […]
Buzogany, A. & Varga, M., 2025. Making Markets Through Coalitions: The European Union and the Debate Over Ukraine’s National Resources. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 63 (1), 108-126.
This article studies how the European Union (EU) influences the dynamics between supporters and opponents of market liberalization in partner countries. We focus on Ukraine’s attempts to safeguard timber trade and agricultural land sales from international markets through moratoria before 2022. We find that the EU intervenes in domestic debates both directly and through domestic […]
Varga, M., 2023. Poverty as Subsistence: The World Bank and Pro-poor Land Reform in Eurasia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Poverty as Subsistence explores the “propertizing” land reform policy that the World Bank advocated throughout the transitioning countries of Eurasia, expecting poverty reduction to result from distributing property titles over agricultural land to local (rural) populations. China’s early 1980s land reform offered support for this expectation, but while the spread of propertizing reform to post-communist […]
Varga, M., 2020. Poverty Reduction through Land Transfers? The World Bank’s Titling Reforms and the Making of “Subsistence” Agriculture. World Development, 135, 105058.
The World Bank emphasizes land reform as a key pro-poor intervention, expecting the transfer of land to the rural poor to trigger a straight transition from poverty and subsistence to entrepreneurial and commercial smallholder farming. This article asks how and why World Bank prescriptions change in response to developments on the ground that contradict initial […]
Varga, M., 2017. Small Farms Survival and Growth: Making Investments Despite Credit Constraints. Sociologia Ruralis, 57, 641-660.
This article argues that we know little about how small farmers in post-communist Europe survive and even grow while having little access to credit markets. In approaching small farmers, this paper builds on ideas of self-provisioning, contending that the tendency among small farmers is not one of growth towards and through economies of scale, but […]
Varga, M., 2016. Worker Protests in Post-communist Romania and Ukraine: Striking with Tied Hands. Manchester University Press.
The book’s main idea is to study why and how successful forms of workers’ interest representation could emerge in a hostile context. The post-communist context makes it difficult for workers and trade unions to mobilize, pose threats to employers, and break out of their political isolation. But initial fieldwork uncovered many instances of worker groups […]
Varga, M., 2015. Trade unions and austerity in Central and Eastern Europe did they do something about it? Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 21 (3), 313-326.
Austerity measures in the wake of the recent world financial crisis often translated into large cuts in public employment and spending, and tax increases. Trade unions throughout Central and Eastern Europe had a disillusioning record of protecting their members against the previous wave of market-making reforms that swept through the entire region in the 1990s. […]
Varga, M., 2013. State strategies of resisting social accountability: Post-Soviet insights. East European Politics and Societies, 27 (4), 727-742.
This article contributes to growing research about the emergence of the rule of law, or horizontal accountability, still a salient difference between Western institutionalized democracies and the new democracies in post-communist Eurasia. Recent research has theorized “social accountability” as a possible mechanism linking public campaigning by civic associations with the activation of institutions of horizontal […]