This book explores the emergence, and in Poland, Hungary, and Russia the coming to power, of politicians and political parties rejecting the consensus around market reforms, democratization, and rule of law that has characterized moves toward an "open society" from the 1990s. It discusses how over the last decade these political actors, together with various think tanks, intellectual circles, and religious actors, have increasingly presented themselves as "conservatives," and outlines how these actors are developing a new local brand of conservatism as a full-fledged ideology that counters the perceived liberal overemphasis on individual rights and freedom, and differs from the ideology of the established, present-day conservative parties of Western Europe. Overall, the book argues that the "renaissance of conservatism" in these countries represents variations on a new, illiberal conservatism that aims to re-establish a strong state sovereignty defining and pursuing a national path of development.

This book explores the emergence, and in Poland, Hungary, and Russia the coming to power, of politicians and political parties rejecting the consensus around market reforms, democratization, and rule of law that has characterized moves toward an "open society" from the 1990s. It discusses how over the last decade these political actors, together with various think tanks, intellectual circles, and religious actors, have increasingly presented themselves as "conservatives," and outlines how these actors are developing a new local brand of conservatism as a full-fledged ideology that counters the perceived liberal overemphasis on individual rights and freedom, and differs from the ideology of the established, present-day conservative parties of Western Europe. Overall, the book argues that the "renaissance of conservatism" in these countries represents variations on a new, illiberal conservatism that aims to re-establish a strong state sovereignty defining and pursuing a national path of development.

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 Eurasia created numerous "subsistence" smallholders, it failed to stimulate entrepreneurship or market-based production among the rural poor. Varga argues that the World Bank advocated a simplified version of China's land reform that ignored a key element of successful reforms: the smallholders' immediate environment, the structure of actors and institutions determining whether smallholders survive and grow in their communities. With concrete insights from analysis of the land reform program throughout post-communist Eurasia and multisited fieldwork in Romania and Ukraine, this book details how and why land reform led to subsistence and the mechanisms underpinning informal commercialization.

Worker protests in post-communist Romania and Ukraine is a book about strategies of trade unions confronting employers in difficult conditions. 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 mobilise, pose threats to employers, and break out of their political isolation, but even under such harsh conditions strategy matters for defending workers' rights and living standards. The cases studied in this book are 18 conflict episodes at 10 privatised plants in the Romanian steel industry and Ukraine's civil machine-building sector in the 2000s. This book should be relevant for anyone taking interest in how and to what extent workers can reassert their influence over the conditions of production in regions and economic sectors characterised by disinvestment (of which outsourcing and 'lean' methods of production are instances). -- .