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.