Mihai Vargas
Biographic Data
| ID | 277798 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mihai Vargas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mihai |
| FAMILY NAME | Vargas |
| SIGNATURE | VARGAS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Freie Universität Berlin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0278-7145 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 201 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Struggle for Wheat: The Weaponization of Trade Interdependence in the Russia-Ukraine War
Western civilisation’s eastern defenders. Transnational right-wing networks from ideas to action
This article investigates the articulation and institutionalisation of ‘civilisationism’ within an emerging international illiberal network that originated in North American conservatism but now centres on collaborative efforts among Central European right-wing intellectuals and think tanks. The network's declared objective is the renewal of Western politics, institutions, and ultimately ‘civilisation’ itself-conceptualised as fundamentally roote…
Making Markets Through Coalitions: The European Union and the Debate Over Ukraine's National Resources
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 pro‐market coalitions to frame these moratoria as expressions of ‘ve…
Russia’s Right and the Putin regime
Breaking the rural underdevelopment trap? Eastern Enlargement, agricultural policy and lessons for Ukraine
Entangled Crisis Narratives in Germany: Strengthening the Anti-Systemic Public
This article studies how crisis management and its narrative discourse are able to strengthen anti-systemic and far-right narratives. We compare government and opposition discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020/2022 and the energy/inflation crisis of 2022/2023 in the German federal state of Saxony. The paper argues that the two crises were intertwined not only through the existence of a 'new cleavage' between political mainstream and righ…
Recurring crises, resilient workers? Biographical-relational resources in worker livelihoods
The impact of shocks and crises on workers and workers' crisis coping strategies are issues of global concern and have generated a rich literature on resilience and sustainable livelihoods. Drawing on insights from social reproduction theory and biographical-narrative research, we draw lessons for the resilience literature from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on workers in a high-outmigration area of Eastern Europe. The area had some of th…
All the Roads to Market: The Soviet Union, China and the World Bank’s Narrative of Capitalism
This essay explores the consequences of postcommunist economic reform for narratives about capitalism, using the example of World Bank discourse. It shows how the World Bank's capitalism narrative has changed to reflect post-Soviet reform complications and the growing Sino-(post-)Soviet contrast. While the capitalism narrative struggles to show that there is one (global) capitalism or market economy model, reform anomalies and the Sino-(post-)Sov…
The War in Ukraine and Food Security in Eastern Europe
This dispatch outlines some of the immediate consequences and long-term challenges posed by the Ukraine war on food security and production systems in Eastern Europe. We draw particular attention to the food aid and provisioning realities around many million (and increasing) numbers of Ukrainian refugees, and the current lack of systemic, government-coordinated responses to the humanitarian crisis. Further, we outline the distinct forms of agricu…
Getting the “basics”? The World Bank’s narrative construction of poverty reduction in China
Mental Maps of Eastern Europe: States, Mentalities, Modernisation
Eastern Europe has been the object of orientalising discourses portraying it as a region defined by problematic statehood, underdevelopment, and nationalist‐religious warmongering. These discourses have produced 19 th ‐century mental maps of Europe contrasting a perceived ‘core’ European area ending with the Frankish Empire's eastern border and coinciding with later Enlightenment influence and an indistinct ‘Orient’ or ‘East’, bypassed by “modern…
The Two Faces of the 'Global Right: Revolutionary Conservatives and National-Conservatives
Studies of the Global Right usually trace its intellectual underpinnings to the revolutionary conservative New Right and its ideas claiming to defend an 'ethno-pluralist' European identity from the multiculturalist threat of a 'Great Replacement' through immigration. A second lineage, which we refer to as 'national-conservative', is less explored and is more concerned with threats to moral order and the loss of moral bearing due to liberalism's r…
Factors influencing cross-border knowledge sharing by police organisations: An integration of ten European case studies
The globalisation of crime means there is an increasingly vital need for effective sharing of knowledge by police organisations across international borders. However, identifying the complexities and challenges of this aspect of international collaboration has been relatively neglected in previous research. The research reported in this paper therefore set out to identify the major barriers and facilitators of international knowledge sharing. Res…
The return of economic nationalism to East Central Europe: Right‐wing intellectual milieus and anti‐liberal resentment
This article emphasises the non‐economic goals of economic nationalism and in particular its often overlooked political goals. Drawing parallels between economic nationalisms in Central Europe and East Asia, it focuses on Poland and Hungary and asks why did these countries turn to economic nationalism. The article traces this turn to ideational foundations developed by right‐wing intellectuals over the last two decades, arguing that right‐wing in…
Illiberal thought collectives and policy networks in Hungary and Poland
Focusing on the emergence of ideas and the knowledge networks involved in producing a counter-narrative to the liberal and neoliberal ideational consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, this contribution traces the intellectual trajectory of the illiberal turn in Poland and Hungary. We make use of the ideational scholarship differentiating between public philosophies, problem definitions and policy solutions to discuss how illiberal state transformation…
The Foreign Policy of Populists in Power: Contesting Liberalism in Poland and Hungary
Ruling right-wing populist parties in Europe have significantly changed foreign policies and advanced criticism against core values of liberal democracy, including dismissive stances vis-à-vis the European Union. This paper argues that the reorientation of foreign policies in Hungary and Poland is consistent with ideas developed by incumbent populist right-wing parties and intellectuals of statecraft in the wider conservative movement supporting …
Poverty reduction through land transfers? The World Bank’s titling reforms and the making of “subsistence” agriculture
‘Subsistence’ Readings: World Bank and State Approaches to Commercialising Agriculture in Post-Communist Eurasia
This article explores the World Bank’s project of ‘returning agriculture to the market’ through land titling reforms. It describes how World Bank and national government strategy papers distinguish between a ‘commercial’ or ‘entrepreneurial’ sector of farming and a ‘subsistence’ agricultural sector in post-communist Eurasia. The extension and growth of the former represents the desired goal of policies since the 1990s, while the latter’s numerica…
From the Qualities of Products to the Qualities of Relations: Value Conventions in the Solidarity Economy in Sicily
This article explores the “quality battlefield” in the food economy – the dispute over value conventions between mainstream business actors and alternative food networks. It shows how actors in one particular alternative network – the solidarity economy – shift such notions from product qualities to the qualities of relations in production. Opposing the standardized criteria characterizing private certification schemes and organic certification, …
Conservative Developmental Statism in East Central Europe and Russia
Russia, Hungary and Poland have been at the forefront of the illiberal counter-movement to neoliberalism. However, while there is increasing knowledge about how ‘populism’ as a discursive strategy has brought illiberals to power, especially in Poland and Hungary, we know surprisingly little about the socioeconomic programme and guiding principles of illiberals. In this article, we argue first that there is such a programme and that – notwithstand…
Resistant to change? Smallholder response to World Bank-sponsored “commercialisation” in Romania and Ukraine
A fragmented agricultural landscape has emerged in the countries that de-collectivised their agriculture through land titling, turning rural population into land owners. Yet, millions of smallholders, rather than entrepreneurial farmers, characterise this landscape. International organisations and authorities blame “subsistence” agriculture and smallholders’ resistance to “commercialisation” which incentivises increased marketing of their product…
The ideational foundations of the illiberal backlash in Central and Eastern Europe: The case of Hungary
While the spread of neoliberal ideas through networks has attracted much attention worldwide, the ideational content of the recent counter-waves to liberal democracy has still received relatively little consideration. This article focuses on the ideational dimension behind the current illiberal backlash in Central and Eastern Europe. We ask how political conceptions critical of the Western liberal paradigm came about and what their main component…
Russia’s Far-Right Violence Wave: Tracing the Development of Terror in a National-Socialist Organization
This article explores the reasons behind a dramatic rise in far-right violence in the late 2000s in Russia that has been attributed mainly to the actions of radicalized parts of a vast skinhead scene. Analysis of one of the most brutal far-right organizations disproves the notion that skinheads are incapable of developing more than “skin-deep ideologies” of racism without the help of politicians and that they merely engage in isolated and spontan…
Cash rather than contract: The re-emergence of traditional agrifood chains in post-communist Europe
Small Farms Survival and Growth: Making Investments Despite Credit Constraints
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 one of internalising and de-monetising costs, by growing in order to control upstream and downstream…
The ideational foundations of the illiberal backlash in Central and Eastern Europe: The case of Hungary
While the spread of neoliberal ideas through networks has attracted much attention worldwide, the ideational content of the recent counter-waves to liberal democracy has still received relatively little consideration. This article focuses on the ideational dimension behind the current illiberal backlash in Central and Eastern Europe. We ask how political conceptions critical of the Western liberal paradigm came about and what their main component…
Conservative Developmental Statism in East Central Europe and Russia
Russia, Hungary and Poland have been at the forefront of the illiberal counter-movement to neoliberalism. However, while there is increasing knowledge about how ‘populism’ as a discursive strategy has brought illiberals to power, especially in Poland and Hungary, we know surprisingly little about the socioeconomic programme and guiding principles of illiberals. In this article, we argue first that there is such a programme and that – notwithstand…
Illiberal thought collectives and policy networks in Hungary and Poland
Focusing on the emergence of ideas and the knowledge networks involved in producing a counter-narrative to the liberal and neoliberal ideational consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, this contribution traces the intellectual trajectory of the illiberal turn in Poland and Hungary. We make use of the ideational scholarship differentiating between public philosophies, problem definitions and policy solutions to discuss how illiberal state transformation…
The Foreign Policy of Populists in Power: Contesting Liberalism in Poland and Hungary
Ruling right-wing populist parties in Europe have significantly changed foreign policies and advanced criticism against core values of liberal democracy, including dismissive stances vis-à-vis the European Union. This paper argues that the reorientation of foreign policies in Hungary and Poland is consistent with ideas developed by incumbent populist right-wing parties and intellectuals of statecraft in the wider conservative movement supporting …
How Political Opportunities Strengthen the Far Right: Understanding the Rise in Far-Right Militancy in Russia
This article provides an overview of recent activities of the far right in Russia (2004-2006) and shows how formal organisations of the far right interact with skinhead subcultures and local communities. It argues that government actions have facilitated an increase in recent far-right militancy (2004-2006) in Russia: the authorities have provided the far-right with political opportunities that their organisations use to coordinate further action…
The Two Faces of the 'Global Right: Revolutionary Conservatives and National-Conservatives
Studies of the Global Right usually trace its intellectual underpinnings to the revolutionary conservative New Right and its ideas claiming to defend an 'ethno-pluralist' European identity from the multiculturalist threat of a 'Great Replacement' through immigration. A second lineage, which we refer to as 'national-conservative', is less explored and is more concerned with threats to moral order and the loss of moral bearing due to liberalism's r…
The return of economic nationalism to East Central Europe: Right‐wing intellectual milieus and anti‐liberal resentment
This article emphasises the non‐economic goals of economic nationalism and in particular its often overlooked political goals. Drawing parallels between economic nationalisms in Central Europe and East Asia, it focuses on Poland and Hungary and asks why did these countries turn to economic nationalism. The article traces this turn to ideational foundations developed by right‐wing intellectuals over the last two decades, arguing that right‐wing in…
Poverty reduction through land transfers? The World Bank’s titling reforms and the making of “subsistence” agriculture
Hungary's “anti-capitalist” far-right: Jobbik and the Hungarian Guard
This article discusses the political success of the far-right Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik). Jobbik is usually depicted as owing its success to anti-Roma and anti-establishment sentiment, mobilized with the help of a paramilitary organization, the Hungarian Guard. With the examples of the party programs, the speeches of Jobbik leaders during marches of the Hungarian Guard, and the press releases of the party between 2008 and 2010, this a…
Resistant to change? Smallholder response to World Bank-sponsored “commercialisation” in Romania and Ukraine
A fragmented agricultural landscape has emerged in the countries that de-collectivised their agriculture through land titling, turning rural population into land owners. Yet, millions of smallholders, rather than entrepreneurial farmers, characterise this landscape. International organisations and authorities blame “subsistence” agriculture and smallholders’ resistance to “commercialisation” which incentivises increased marketing of their product…
Cash rather than contract: The re-emergence of traditional agrifood chains in post-communist Europe
Russia’s Right and the Putin regime
Making Markets Through Coalitions: The European Union and the Debate Over Ukraine's National Resources
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 pro‐market coalitions to frame these moratoria as expressions of ‘ve…
Mental Maps of Eastern Europe: States, Mentalities, Modernisation
Eastern Europe has been the object of orientalising discourses portraying it as a region defined by problematic statehood, underdevelopment, and nationalist‐religious warmongering. These discourses have produced 19 th ‐century mental maps of Europe contrasting a perceived ‘core’ European area ending with the Frankish Empire's eastern border and coinciding with later Enlightenment influence and an indistinct ‘Orient’ or ‘East’, bypassed by “modern…
Small Farms Survival and Growth: Making Investments Despite Credit Constraints
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 one of internalising and de-monetising costs, by growing in order to control upstream and downstream…
The Threat of Selective Democracy. Popular Dissatisfaction and Exclusionary Strategy of Elites in East Central and Southeastern Europe
The large dissatisfaction of citizens with post-communist democracy in Central and Eastern Europe favors populist and anti-systemic parties and movements. These parties accuse their rivals of various forms of corruption and prescribe anti-systemic cures, including the discretionary exclusion of their rivals from political life. Analyzing the situations in Poland, Romania, and Hungary more closely, we reveal a risk of the development of “selective…
Containing Militancy: Workers, Trade Unions and Factory Regimes in Ukraine
Seeking to understand the variation in the militancy of Eastern European workers, the article argues in favor of a research agenda that places the workplace and the constraints it places on workers’ action at the center of analysis. Partly based on recent fieldwork at five plants organized by the Union of Auto- and Farm-Machine Building of Ukraine, the article explores the reasons for the difference between the conciliatory approach of organized …
Breaking the rural underdevelopment trap? Eastern Enlargement, agricultural policy and lessons for Ukraine
Entangled Crisis Narratives in Germany: Strengthening the Anti-Systemic Public
This article studies how crisis management and its narrative discourse are able to strengthen anti-systemic and far-right narratives. We compare government and opposition discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020/2022 and the energy/inflation crisis of 2022/2023 in the German federal state of Saxony. The paper argues that the two crises were intertwined not only through the existence of a 'new cleavage' between political mainstream and righ…
Recurring crises, resilient workers? Biographical-relational resources in worker livelihoods
The impact of shocks and crises on workers and workers' crisis coping strategies are issues of global concern and have generated a rich literature on resilience and sustainable livelihoods. Drawing on insights from social reproduction theory and biographical-narrative research, we draw lessons for the resilience literature from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on workers in a high-outmigration area of Eastern Europe. The area had some of th…
Getting the “basics”? The World Bank’s narrative construction of poverty reduction in China
Russia’s Far-Right Violence Wave: Tracing the Development of Terror in a National-Socialist Organization
This article explores the reasons behind a dramatic rise in far-right violence in the late 2000s in Russia that has been attributed mainly to the actions of radicalized parts of a vast skinhead scene. Analysis of one of the most brutal far-right organizations disproves the notion that skinheads are incapable of developing more than “skin-deep ideologies” of racism without the help of politicians and that they merely engage in isolated and spontan…
State Strategies of Resisting Social Accountability: Post-Soviet Insights
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 accountability. By reviewing the r…
Strategies of Disruption: Factory Unions Facing Asset-Strippers in Post-Communist Romania and Ukraine
The author uses ethnographic fieldwork to examine what forms of disruption trade unions use in resisting asset-strippers at four factories in the metal sector of post-Communist Romania and Ukraine. He shows how understanding disruption as differentiating among various targets and protest actions, and adapting actions to targets, allows researchers to make sense of how, when employers are uninterested in production, unions can effectively protest …
How Political Opportunities Strengthen the Far Right: Understanding the Rise in Far-Right Militancy in Russia
This article provides an overview of recent activities of the far right in Russia (2004-2006) and shows how formal organisations of the far right interact with skinhead subcultures and local communities. It argues that government actions have facilitated an increase in recent far-right militancy (2004-2006) in Russia: the authorities have provided the far-right with political opportunities that their organisations use to coordinate further action…
An Anatomy of ‘Collective Anti-Collectivism’: Labor Sociology in Ukraine and Romania
This article shows that workers (their life-worlds and instances of collective action) have been conspicuously absent from the work of local sociologists by researching three sociological journals of professional associations and Academies of Sciences in Ukraine and Romania. Such an absence is particularly puzzling given the dramatic deterioration in the material situation of the working class in both countries during post-communism, some experie…
Containing Militancy: Workers, Trade Unions and Factory Regimes in Ukraine
Seeking to understand the variation in the militancy of Eastern European workers, the article argues in favor of a research agenda that places the workplace and the constraints it places on workers’ action at the center of analysis. Partly based on recent fieldwork at five plants organized by the Union of Auto- and Farm-Machine Building of Ukraine, the article explores the reasons for the difference between the conciliatory approach of organized …
Working-Class Heresies”: Ideology in Protests of Ukrainian Workers During the World Economic Crisis 2009–2012
This article studies the ideas and ideologies publicly expressed by workers’ organizations (alternative trade unions and various support groups) in Ukraine during the world economic crisis. Studying such ideas allows insights into the extent to which the post-communist political-economic order has won the acceptance of important segments of society; about how the mobilized parts of the working class perceive the country’s political leaders, and a…
The Threat of Selective Democracy. Popular Dissatisfaction and Exclusionary Strategy of Elites in East Central and Southeastern Europe
The large dissatisfaction of citizens with post-communist democracy in Central and Eastern Europe favors populist and anti-systemic parties and movements. These parties accuse their rivals of various forms of corruption and prescribe anti-systemic cures, including the discretionary exclusion of their rivals from political life. Analyzing the situations in Poland, Romania, and Hungary more closely, we reveal a risk of the development of “selective…
State Strategies of Resisting Social Accountability: Post-Soviet Insights
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 accountability. By reviewing the r…
Strategies of Disruption: Factory Unions Facing Asset-Strippers in Post-Communist Romania and Ukraine
The author uses ethnographic fieldwork to examine what forms of disruption trade unions use in resisting asset-strippers at four factories in the metal sector of post-Communist Romania and Ukraine. He shows how understanding disruption as differentiating among various targets and protest actions, and adapting actions to targets, allows researchers to make sense of how, when employers are uninterested in production, unions can effectively protest …
Hungary's “anti-capitalist” far-right: Jobbik and the Hungarian Guard
This article discusses the political success of the far-right Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik). Jobbik is usually depicted as owing its success to anti-Roma and anti-establishment sentiment, mobilized with the help of a paramilitary organization, the Hungarian Guard. With the examples of the party programs, the speeches of Jobbik leaders during marches of the Hungarian Guard, and the press releases of the party between 2008 and 2010, this a…
Trade unions and austerity in Central and Eastern Europe: Did They Do Something About It?
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. Would unions perform better this time? As the article shows, in three of the four coun…
Russia’s Far-Right Violence Wave: Tracing the Development of Terror in a National-Socialist Organization
This article explores the reasons behind a dramatic rise in far-right violence in the late 2000s in Russia that has been attributed mainly to the actions of radicalized parts of a vast skinhead scene. Analysis of one of the most brutal far-right organizations disproves the notion that skinheads are incapable of developing more than “skin-deep ideologies” of racism without the help of politicians and that they merely engage in isolated and spontan…
Cash rather than contract: The re-emergence of traditional agrifood chains in post-communist Europe
Small Farms Survival and Growth: Making Investments Despite Credit Constraints
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 one of internalising and de-monetising costs, by growing in order to control upstream and downstream…
The ideational foundations of the illiberal backlash in Central and Eastern Europe: The case of Hungary
While the spread of neoliberal ideas through networks has attracted much attention worldwide, the ideational content of the recent counter-waves to liberal democracy has still received relatively little consideration. This article focuses on the ideational dimension behind the current illiberal backlash in Central and Eastern Europe. We ask how political conceptions critical of the Western liberal paradigm came about and what their main component…
‘Subsistence’ Readings: World Bank and State Approaches to Commercialising Agriculture in Post-Communist Eurasia
This article explores the World Bank’s project of ‘returning agriculture to the market’ through land titling reforms. It describes how World Bank and national government strategy papers distinguish between a ‘commercial’ or ‘entrepreneurial’ sector of farming and a ‘subsistence’ agricultural sector in post-communist Eurasia. The extension and growth of the former represents the desired goal of policies since the 1990s, while the latter’s numerica…
From the Qualities of Products to the Qualities of Relations: Value Conventions in the Solidarity Economy in Sicily
This article explores the “quality battlefield” in the food economy – the dispute over value conventions between mainstream business actors and alternative food networks. It shows how actors in one particular alternative network – the solidarity economy – shift such notions from product qualities to the qualities of relations in production. Opposing the standardized criteria characterizing private certification schemes and organic certification, …
Conservative Developmental Statism in East Central Europe and Russia
Russia, Hungary and Poland have been at the forefront of the illiberal counter-movement to neoliberalism. However, while there is increasing knowledge about how ‘populism’ as a discursive strategy has brought illiberals to power, especially in Poland and Hungary, we know surprisingly little about the socioeconomic programme and guiding principles of illiberals. In this article, we argue first that there is such a programme and that – notwithstand…
Resistant to change? Smallholder response to World Bank-sponsored “commercialisation” in Romania and Ukraine
A fragmented agricultural landscape has emerged in the countries that de-collectivised their agriculture through land titling, turning rural population into land owners. Yet, millions of smallholders, rather than entrepreneurial farmers, characterise this landscape. International organisations and authorities blame “subsistence” agriculture and smallholders’ resistance to “commercialisation” which incentivises increased marketing of their product…
Poverty reduction through land transfers? The World Bank’s titling reforms and the making of “subsistence” agriculture
Factors influencing cross-border knowledge sharing by police organisations: An integration of ten European case studies
The globalisation of crime means there is an increasingly vital need for effective sharing of knowledge by police organisations across international borders. However, identifying the complexities and challenges of this aspect of international collaboration has been relatively neglected in previous research. The research reported in this paper therefore set out to identify the major barriers and facilitators of international knowledge sharing. Res…
The return of economic nationalism to East Central Europe: Right‐wing intellectual milieus and anti‐liberal resentment
This article emphasises the non‐economic goals of economic nationalism and in particular its often overlooked political goals. Drawing parallels between economic nationalisms in Central Europe and East Asia, it focuses on Poland and Hungary and asks why did these countries turn to economic nationalism. The article traces this turn to ideational foundations developed by right‐wing intellectuals over the last two decades, arguing that right‐wing in…
Illiberal thought collectives and policy networks in Hungary and Poland
Focusing on the emergence of ideas and the knowledge networks involved in producing a counter-narrative to the liberal and neoliberal ideational consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, this contribution traces the intellectual trajectory of the illiberal turn in Poland and Hungary. We make use of the ideational scholarship differentiating between public philosophies, problem definitions and policy solutions to discuss how illiberal state transformation…
The Foreign Policy of Populists in Power: Contesting Liberalism in Poland and Hungary
Ruling right-wing populist parties in Europe have significantly changed foreign policies and advanced criticism against core values of liberal democracy, including dismissive stances vis-à-vis the European Union. This paper argues that the reorientation of foreign policies in Hungary and Poland is consistent with ideas developed by incumbent populist right-wing parties and intellectuals of statecraft in the wider conservative movement supporting …
The War in Ukraine and Food Security in Eastern Europe
This dispatch outlines some of the immediate consequences and long-term challenges posed by the Ukraine war on food security and production systems in Eastern Europe. We draw particular attention to the food aid and provisioning realities around many million (and increasing) numbers of Ukrainian refugees, and the current lack of systemic, government-coordinated responses to the humanitarian crisis. Further, we outline the distinct forms of agricu…
Getting the “basics”? The World Bank’s narrative construction of poverty reduction in China
Mental Maps of Eastern Europe: States, Mentalities, Modernisation
Eastern Europe has been the object of orientalising discourses portraying it as a region defined by problematic statehood, underdevelopment, and nationalist‐religious warmongering. These discourses have produced 19 th ‐century mental maps of Europe contrasting a perceived ‘core’ European area ending with the Frankish Empire's eastern border and coinciding with later Enlightenment influence and an indistinct ‘Orient’ or ‘East’, bypassed by “modern…
Political science (31 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Economics (18 works) · Political economy (18 works) · Law (14 works) · Business (11 works) · Communism (10 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (9 works)