Emmy Noether Group – Peripheral Debt: Money, Risk and Politics in Eastern Europe

Research period: 2019–2025
 

Peripheral Debt studied household debt and retail finance in postsocialist Eastern Europe. The DFG-funded Emmy Noether Research Group was based at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and conducted ethnographic and historical anthropological research in Croatia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. It examined how households, creditors, activists, lawyers, regulators, welfare agencies, and other actors use, cope with, contest, and govern debt in societies marked by rapid and often volatile financialization.

The project addressed three gaps in earlier anthropological work on household debt: the limited attention paid to money and currency in household lending; the underdeveloped analysis of risk in everyday credit relations; and the relative neglect of Eastern European experiences with debt after the Global Financial Crisis. Beyond these original foci, the group developed a broader comparative account of peripheral household financialization: the forms of lending, regulation, contestation, and debt management that emerged in a region deeply shaped by foreign capital inflows, Western-owned banks, post-crisis austerity, and changing housing and welfare regimes.

About the project

In the years before the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008, household debt expanded rapidly across much of Eastern Europe. Foreign-owned banks and other financial actors introduced new forms of retail credit, including mortgage loans, foreign-currency loans, high-cost consumer loans, and other products that transferred significant risks to debtors. The boom was followed by debt crises, defaults, increase in debt collection and enforcement, public controversy, and political struggles over who should bear the costs of failed lending arrangements.

Peripheral Debt investigated these developments from the perspective of economic and political anthropology. Rather than treating household debt simply as a question of individual financial behaviour or macroeconomic statistics, the project approached it as a set of social relations and practices. It asked how people borrow, repay, default, litigate, organize, give advice on, collect, regulate, and narrate debt, and how these practices reveal the regional manifestations of financialization.

The group combined long-term ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, participant observation, archival and documentary research, analysis of media and legal materials, and engagement with economic, sociological, geographic, and policy scholarship. Its research built on earlier work at the MPI, especially the Research Group
“Financialisation” led by Chris Hann and Don Kalb, while adding closer attention to the economic and technical properties of finance - money, currency, interest, risk, credit scoring, debt collection and enforcement, and legal infrastructures.

Research findings 

The project showed that household debt in Eastern Europe cannot be understood only as a local consequence of global financialization. It is also a field in which money, law, housing, social policy, class formation, migration, nationalism, and everyday morality intersect. Several findings cut across the individual country studies.

Money, currency, and foreign-currency lending

A major strand of the project analysed Swiss franc lending in Croatia, Poland, Hungary, and Eastern Europe more broadly. These loans were attractive because they appeared cheaper than local-currency loans, but they exposed debtors to exchange-rate risks that most households could not meaningfully assess or manage. Project publications showed how governments handled the resulting crises in different ways, creating different openings for debtor activism, litigation, conversion schemes, and other forms of contestation. A related strand of work examined Croatia’s 2023 adoption of the euro as the end point of a long history of monetary peripherality and dependence.

Risk and the technical properties of credit

Peripheral Debt foregrounded risk as a central but often under-analysed dimension of household lending. Work on Croatian mortgage lending showed how risks were constructed, distributed, and later partly reduced after the Global Financial Crisis and the Swiss franc loan crisis. Other work examined predatory cross-border mortgage lending by Austrian local banks in Croatia, where high-cost and high-risk products were linked to default and home foreclosure. Across these cases, the project argued that the “technical” properties of loans - currencies, interest rates, collateral, repayment schedules, scoring systems, and legal clauses - have concrete social and political consequences.

Problem debt and debt apparatuses

Another central contribution was the concept of “problem debt” and the comparative analysis of the agencies and infrastructures that manage it. The project studied debt collection, debt enforcement, personal bankruptcy, debt advice, financial literacy, and consumer protection as parts of “debt apparatuses” – institutions with a mandate to manage and deal with problem debt. These apparatuses do not merely solve problems created elsewhere; they actively shape what counts as a problem debt, who is seen as responsible, what kind of help is available, and how costs and risks are distributed among debtors, creditors, states, and other actors.

Everyday economics of debt

The group also examined the everyday uses and meanings of debt. Work on mortgage pathways in Zagreb followed the life course of mortgages: why people took them, what they meant for housing and household projects, how debtors reasoned and acted around them, and how mortgages produced housing wealth, insecurity, or both. In a different register, research on overindebtedness and debt enforcement in Croatia showed how migration could become one way of coping with debt pressure. These studies highlight the material outcomes of borrowing, debtors’ decision-making, and the contingent trajectories through which debt becomes part of everyday life.

Comparative and theoretical contributions

The project contributed to the conceptualization of household financialization and peripheral financialization. It showed that Eastern Europe experienced not only a pre-crisis boom and post-crisis bust, but also a longer and more varied development of retail finance. In some contexts, such as Slovakia, household debt expanded most strongly after the Global Financial Crisis, especially through mortgages, helping to generate new inequalities linked to housing assets. In others, such as Croatia, Hungary, and Poland, lending stagnated or declined over extended periods of time as foreign-currency lending, debt enforcement, debtor activism, and litigation became central political issues. The group’s comparative work therefore traces variegated pathways of household financialization rather than a single regional model.

Projects of the Research Group

Marek Mikuš - Household debt, housing finance, and debt apparatuses in Croatia and Slovakia

Marek Mikuš led the group and conducted research on Croatia and Slovakia, with a broader comparative and historical focus on household financialization in Eastern Europe. His Croatian work examined the trajectories of mortgage debt in Zagreb; the classed politics of mortgaged homeownership; the Swiss franc loan crisis; predatory cross-border mortgages; debt collection and enforcement; the deservingness of debtors; and the relationship between overindebtedness, enforcement, and outmigration. His Slovak work focused on the rapid post-crisis growth of household debt, the rise of mortgage finance, the social and political role of mortgage subsidies, financial literacy, and the institutions dealing with problem debt, including debt advice and personal bankruptcy. Across these studies, he developed an approach that combines ethnography, historical anthropology, political economy, and attention to the technical infrastructures of finance.

Balázs Gosztonyi - Valuable Defaults: debt collection, debt enforcement, and debt advice in Hungary

Balázs Gosztonyi’s doctoral project examined debt collection and overindebtedness in Hungary. It focused on the market and legal infrastructures through which defaulted household debts are valued, sold, collected, enforced, and sometimes alleviated. Using ethnographic research among debt collectors, financial professionals, lawyers, judicial officers, debt advisers, and debtors, the project analysed how creditor-debtor relations are reshaped after default. It also studied how representations of problem debt in Hungarian media and politics validated debtors’ perspectives while reinforcing specific debt-management policies. The project contributes to anthropology, economic sociology, and social studies of finance by bringing debt collection – a central but often hidden part of financialized economies – into view.

Mathias Sosnowski Krabbe - The finances, futures, and fights of the frankowicze

Mathias Sosnowski Krabbe’s doctoral project studied Polish Swiss franc mortgage debtors, commonly known as frankowicze. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Warsaw, it examined the legal, financial, and political dimensions of their mass litigation against banks. In Poland, the absence of a comprehensive state conversion scheme made litigation the dominant form of contestation. Debtors relied on specialised law firms, European consumer protection law, and national courts to challenge loan contracts, while banks and public financial institutions framed the resulting legal victories as a major risk to financial stability. The project shows how debtor contestation can become individualized and market-based, dependent on legal infrastructures and commercial expertise, while still producing wider political and economic effects.

Collaborative and comparative work 

Peripheral Debt was also a platform for collaborative research. Project cooperation partners and visiting scholars – including Ágnes Gagyi, Petra Rodik, Judit Durst, and Jitka Králová – contributed to workshops, publications, seminars, and comparative discussions. Collaborative outputs included work on Swiss franc mortgages in Eastern Europe, housing finance after foreign-currency loan crises, moral economies of housing in Croatia, low-end financialization in rural Hungary, problem debt in Europe, and the broader financialization of households. These collaborations helped situate the four core country studies within wider debates on household finance, inequality, housing, welfare, and postsocialist transformation.

Events and ongoing initiatives 

The main scientific event of the project was the conference “Household Finance in an Unequal World: Social Approaches”, held at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle on 5–6 December 2024. The call for papers attracted more than 50 abstracts, and the final programme featured seven sessions with 27 papers by 33 contributors. The conference brought together anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, political economists, historians, and other social scientists working on various aspects of household finance.

The conference directly generated an ongoing edited-volume project: The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Household Finance. Co-edited by Marek Mikuš, Ryan Davey, Marie Kolling and Rano Turaeva, the handbook is planned as a major interdisciplinary reference work on social-scientific approaches to household finance. It will include chapters by members of the Peripheral Debt group and by many workshop participants and invited contributors, extending the project’s agenda beyond Eastern Europe and consolidating a broader field of research on household finance.

Other project events included the workshop “Foreign-Currency Housing Loans in Eastern Europe: Crises, Tensions and Struggles”, organised in Zagreb in February 2020 by Ágnes Gagyi, Marek Mikuš, and Petra Rodik; an online talk by Ágnes Gagyi on forex debtors’ activism and Hungary’s financial regime in September 2021; and the hybrid seminar “Entanglements of Debt, Politics and Moralities in East-Central Europe” with talks by visiting scholars Judit Durst and Jitka Králová in June 2023. Members of the group also convened panels at major conferences, including IUAES, the Regional Studies Association Central and Eastern Europe Conference, AAA, the Capitalist Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe conference, and SIEF.

Selected publications

Edited collections, special issues, and theme sections

1. Gagyi, A. & M. Mikuš, eds. 2022. Housing finance in the aftermath of the foreign-currency mortgage crisis in Eastern Europe. Special issue of Critical Housing Analysis. Editorial: https://doi.org/10.13060/23362839.2022.9.1.539
2. Gagyi, A. & M. Mikuš, eds. 2023. Boom, crisis and politics of Swiss franc mortgages in Eastern Europe. Special feature of City. Introduction: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2023.2229695
3. Mikuš, M. & P. Rodik, eds. 2021. Households and financialization in Europe: mapping variegated patterns in semi-peripheries. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003028857
4. Mikuš, M. & I. Sabaté Muriel, eds. 2025. Managing problem debt in Europe. Theme section of Focaal. Introduction: https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2025.1010101

Selected articles, chapters, and entries

1. Bobek, A., M. Mikuš & M. Sokol. 2023. Making sense of the financialization of households: state of the art and beyond. Socio-Economic Review 21(4): 2233–2258. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwad029
2. Gosztonyi, B. 2025. “Trapped in horror transactions”: tabloid representations of the non-performing loans crisis and hardship defaults in Hungary. Focaal 101: 52–66. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2025.1010105
3. Krabbe, M. S. 2023. From laissez-faire lending to the marketization of litigation: the case of Swiss franc debtors in Poland. City 27(3-4): 618–635. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2023.2229199
4. Mikuš, M. 2020. Making debt work: debating and devising debt collection in Croatia. In C. Hann & D. Kalb, eds., Financialization: Relational Approaches. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 241–265. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781789207514
5. Mikuš, M. 2021. The anthropology of financialization in Eastern Europe. In M. S. Aldenderfer, ed., Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.355
6. Mikuš, M. 2022. “New” but “squeezed”: middle class and mortgaged homeownership in Croatia. Critique of Anthropology 42(4): 439–456. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221139159
7. Mikuš, M. 2022. Whither peripheral financialization? Housing finance in Croatia since the Global Financial Crisis. Critical Housing Analysis 9(1): 57–67. https://doi.org/10.13060/23362839.2022.9.1.541
8. Mikuš, M. 2024. Tracking mortgage pathways in Zagreb: everyday economics of debt, housing wealth, and debtors’ agency in a European semi-periphery. Current Anthropology 65(4): 701–723. https://doi.org/10.1086/731252
9. Mikuš, M. 2025. Retail finance, mortgage lending, and risk. In C. Grasseni, E. Bähre, D. R. Holmes & C. Kanters, eds., Elgar Encyclopedia of Economic Anthropology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 191–197. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035312573.00050
10. Rodik, P. & M. Mikuš. 2023. Moral economies of housing in post-boom Croatia: Swiss franc loans crisis and politics of housing financialization. City 27(3-4): 579–598. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2023.2229196

People

• Head of Research Group: Marek Mikuš
• Doctoral researchers: Balázs Gosztonyi; Mathias Sosnowski Krabbe
• Visiting scholars: Judit Durst; Ágnes Gagyi; Jitka Králová

Marek Mikuš is an economic and political anthropologist and sociologist. He headed Peripheral Debt at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and is currently a senior researcher at the Institute for Migration Research in Zagreb. His work has focused on civil society, state transformation, and household and public finance, especially household debt, in Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Eastern Europe more broadly.

Funding

Peripheral Debt was funded by the Emmy Noether Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG). The programme supports early-career researchers in establishing independent junior research groups and qualifying for professorships.