Centre of Development Studies Staff
Ilias Alami
Ilias Alami is a political economist who writes about global capitalism, geopolitics, the green transition, global finance, and race. Some of his writings this year have focused on the new form of geopolitical rivalry, or “Second Cold War”, currently unfolding between the United States and China, notably in the context of the green transition. He’s also written on the greater embrace of industrial policy and state ownership across the world economy, including on the part of the Trump administration. Some of his forthcoming writings this year focus on the relationship between race, racism and global finance, the political economy of green industrialisation in developing countries, and the mobilisation of state-owned capital for imperial scrambles over AI tech and critical minerals. This year, Ilias became a fellow of the Transition Security Project –which investigates the US and UK military industrial complexes, their political economy and the threats they pose to the climate transition. He also became a commissioner at the Transatlantic Green Planning Commission, a two-year initiative to develop the case for democratic planning and economic coordination as key approaches to rapid decarbonization and addressing economic insecurity.
Key Publication:
Alami, I., Taggart, J., & Chodor, T. (2025). Rebuilding the Ladder? Contemporary Contests Over Industrial Policy. Global Policy. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-5899.70064
Yunan Xu
Dr Yunan Xu’s research centers on the politics of global food system transformation, asking who shapes its character, pace, and direction, and how. Her work focuses on China-global interconnections, with a geographical scope covering Ethiopia, Mozambique, Colombia, Cambodia, Myanmar and China.
She understands agri-food system not as a stand-alone sector but as one deeply interacts with land property and use, chemical/energy, and infrastructure (physical, digital and financial) sectors. Her research thus engages with land politics, the agrochemical complex, plantations, rural transformation, labour dynamics, and changing livelihoods. Meanwhile, she explores how China’s domestic dynamics are constantly shaping and shaped by global dynamics. Her study put the logic of capital front and centre, highlighting China’s complex role in the global land rush and broader food system transformations.
By analysing internal-external dynamics and both intra- and intersectoral interconnections, empirically, her research provides a more nuanced understanding of today’s agri-food system, which are closely linked to hunger, health, and environmental issues and affect rural and urban communities across the Global North and South. Theoretically, she advances an interconnection framework to better capture global food system transformations, especially at the convergence of food, climate, energy, and financial crises.
Key publications:
Xu, Y., & Chen, Y. 2024. The agrochemical complex of China: historical, global and intersectoral connections. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2024.2429477
Xu, Yunan, 2020. Industrial Tree Plantations and the Land Rush in China: Implications for Global Land Grabbing. London: Routledge.
Graham Denyer Willis
Inequality is getting worse. Better stated, people around the world are ever-more aware of the gaps, barriers, and entrenched nature of unequal life chances, speaking and practicing this truth ever more clearly. In response, we are witnessing ever harder forces of retrenchment, nationalism and bordering. With a focus on Brazil in particular -but not only- Graham’s work examines how and why inequality is maintained and contested on an everyday basis. This means a focus on commonplace institutions like police, prisons and cemeteries, including who they are for (and not for), and why. But it also means refocussing on the historical and contemporary forms of contestation and efforts to escape from inequality, and that are criminalised, cast as evil or described as beyond the pale for their times: fugitive slaves, ‘illegal’ migrants, prisoners, the urban poor, the racialised. For his work across these topics, Graham was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize from the Leverhulme Trust in 2022.
Key Publications:
Denyer Willis, Graham. (2023). ‘Trust and Safety’: Exchange, Protection and the Digital Market-Fortress in Platform Capitalism. Socio-Economic Review, 21(4), 1877-1895.
Denyer Willis, Graham. (2022). Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil. Oakland: University of California Press.
Denyer Willis, Graham. (2022). Pizza in Prison: Failing Family Men, Civil Punishment, and the Policing of Whiteness in São Paulo. American Ethnologist, 49(2), 221-233
Ekin Kurtiç
Ekin Kurtiç is an environmental and political anthropologist with interdisciplinary interests in environmental justice, infrastructure-led development, state and technopolitics, and rural futures. Her research centres on understanding how environmental ideas and practices are incorporated into the production of state, expert, and military power.
Guided by a broader interest in analysing the elite capture of environmental concerns, her research and teaching focus regionally on Turkey and the Middle East. She is currently writing her first book, Sediments of the Future: Building Dams, Restoring Nature in the Çoruh Basin. The book critically examines state-led nature restoration projects implemented alongside large dam construction. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Turkey, Sediments of the Future explores how the design and maintenance of future life in landscapes transformed by mega-infrastructure becomes a novel governmental concern, producing new ecologies and power asymmetries.
Most recently, Ekin has embarked on a historical ethnographic research project on militarized ecologies, focusing on the Turkish military’s past and present role in afforestation and tree planting. She is also developing a new multi-sited ethnographic project, tentatively titled Soil as Carbon Sink: Eco-fix in the Age of Climate Change. This research critically examines emerging forms of power and profit generated through the approach to soil as green infrastructure. Broadly, the project aims to identify and analyse the diverse set of the actors, interests, and contestations involved in the rise of nature-based solutions cast as an “ecological fix” to climate change.
Key Publications:
Material Politics in Turkey: Infrastructure, Science and Expertise, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025. (co-edited with Duygu Kasdogan and Mehmet Ekinci)
Salvage work: The making of movable nature for post-submergence life, Political Geography, Vol. 121, 2025.
Marthe Achtnich
Marthe is an anthropologist working on migration and mobility. Her research centres around the lived experiences, governance and economies of migration, with a focus on migrants’ journeys, particularly to and through Libya, the Mediterranean and Europe. She has conducted multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with migrants in Libya and in Malta.
Marthe’s book ‘Mobility Economies in Europe’s Borderlands: Migrants’ Journeys through Libya and the Mediterranean’ was published with Cambridge University Press in 2023. It is the winner of the 2024 BISA Susan Strange Best Book Prize. Bringing the perspectives of migrants to the fore, the book traces the journeys of sub-Saharan migrants along one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes: through the Sahara Desert, Libya, and by boat to Malta in Europe. Demonstrating how these migrant journeys become sources of profit for various actors, the book prompts a rethinking of mobile life and economic practices under contemporary capitalism.
Marthe’s most recent work engages with the concept of the ‘bioeconomy’ in relation to mobility, examining the intersections between migration, economy and health.
Marthe has also published her work in American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Economy and Society and Geopolitics.
Key Publication:
Achtnich, Marthe 2023. Mobility Economies in Europe’s Borderlands: Migrants’ Journeys through Libya and the Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Winner of the 2024 BISA Susan Strange Best Book Prize)
Maha Abdelrahman
I am a professor of Development Studies and Middle East Politics with a background in political sociology. I have two major research areas: The first is the politics of state-civil society relations and the role of social movements in social and political transformation. I have published widely on civil society politics, protest movements and uprisings in the Middle East. My first book (2004), Civil Society Exposed: The Politics of NGOs in Egypt, critically analyses how aid and development discourses and practices depoliticize the progressive potential of civil society. The book is based on my PhD dissertation which won the prize for the best PhD in International Development from the Institute of International Development in Amsterdam. In Egypt’s Long Revolution: Protest Movements and Uprisings (2015), I trace a decade of networked activism which culminated in the January 2011 uprising in Egypt, debunking long-held assumptions about the dynamics of civil society and social movements in the region.
My second research interest focuses on the digitalization of development interventions and how digital apps operate as political technologies which intersect with neoliberal politics and business models to create value for capital in a Big Data society. My article ‘Trauma apps and the making of the “smart” refugee’ in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2023) reveals how ‘mental prints’ of trauma are extracted from millions of refugees who are expected to emerge from their traumatic experience as digitally connected, resilient subjects. I am currently working on a project examining the rise of the digital FemTech industry in the Arab region from a critical feminist perspective.
Key Publications:
(2023) Trauma apps and the making of the ‘smart’ refugee. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 41(3), 513–528.
(2022) A Crisis Like No Other? COVID-19, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis Narratives Development and Change 53(6) Special Issue Editor
(2022) The indefatigable worker: From factory floor to Zoom avatar. Critical Sociology, 48(1), 75-90.
(2015) Egypt’s Long Revolution: Protest Movements and Uprisings London: Routledge
(2004) Civil Society Exposed: The Politics of NGOs in Egypt, London: I.B. Tauris, New York: St. Martins/Macmillan
Julien Migozzi
My research investigates how digital capitalism affects development and inequality. I analyse how data, algorithms, and platforms transform industries such as real estate and finance, and how these changes impact social and spatial divides through the reorganisation of firms, cities, and markets. My work positions South Africa as a key site to examine how start-ups, AI, and venture capital are presented as solutions for 21st-century development, especially in housing and financial services sectors. A crucial aspect is critically examining how the policies, digital infrastructures, and practices driving the digital economy in emerging countries reflect and challenge the US-centric model and the political agenda of the Silicon Valley. An important part of my work also involves designing mixed-methods approaches that combine qualitative and computational methods, such as expert interviews and data science, to uncover how the digitisation of economies and everyday lives reshapes inequalities through the transformation of space, the diffusion of technology, and the circulation of capital.
Key Publications:
Migozzi, J. 2025. “Scoring High, Paying up, Gating in: Middle-class Formation and Asset Inequalities under Digital Capitalism in South Africa.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.70004.
Wójcik D, Iliopoulos P, Ioannou S, Keenan L, Migozzi J, Monteath T, Pazitka V, Torrance M, Urban M. Atlas of finance: Mapping the global story of money. Yale University Press, 2024.
Jostein Hauge
Jostein Hauge is a political economist working on how countries in the Global South can industrialize (develop a manufacturing base), in a world where globalization, digital technologies, climate stress, and power asymmetries change the rules of the game. In his book "The Future of the Factory: How Megatrends are Changing Industrialization", he argues that industrialization is still crucial for economic development, but the pathways into it are now more complex — shaped by four major forces (what he calls “megatrends”): the rise of services, digital automation technologies, globalized production networks, and ecological constraints.
Hauge studies how these forces interact with politics, economic power, and international trade rules. He also examines real-world cases (especially in Africa and Asia) to show how countries can or cannot use industrial policy effectively under these new conditions.
His most recent research has two thematic strands: 1) China's rise and its global economic ramifications; 2) Progressive and international approaches to green industrial policy. His recent publications on these topics have garnered global attention, and he has appeared on several media channels to discuss his research, such as Novara Media, The Majority Report, and the Sinica Podcast.
Key Publications:
Hauge, J., Houtzager, B. and Hoermann, A. J. (2025). The new economic nationalism: industrial policy and national security in the United States, China, and the European Union. Geoforum, 166 (2025): 104382.
Hauge, J. and Hickel, J. (2025). A progressive framework for green industrial policy. New Political Economy, 1-18.
CDS Researchers
Rafael Shimabukuro
The idea of modernity has long had a powerful allure. It often evokes notions of freedom, equality and universal self-fulfilment. However, this allure has never been unproblematic. Modernity has been intimately implicated with projects of colonisation, oppression and exploitation from above. Seeking to make sense of the tension at the heart of modernity, Rafael’s work examines how the working classes and other subaltern groups have imagined and reimagined ‘progress’ and modernity from below. Focusing on Peru, but taking a self-consciously global approach, Rafael’s work has examined radical local experiments in urban democracy and socialist self-management, the relationship between socialism and indigeneity, and how past indigenous movements have conceptualised the universal and the particular. His inter-disciplinary work has also reframed the history of the neoliberal turn in Peru, emphasising the importance of consent alongside coercion, unthreading the role of clothing in building right-populist coalitions and exploring how long-standing subaltern desires for peace, ‘progress’ and recognition can co-exist with, and even contribute to, neoliberal rationalities.
Key publications:
Shimabukuro, R (2025). ‘Heroic Creation and the Socialist City: The Making of Villa El Salvador’. Antipode.
Shimabukuro, R (2025). ‘Kimonos, Ponchos and Blue Jeans: The Politics of Clothing in Alberto Fujimori’s Performative Populism’. Political Studies.
Bruna Angotti
Questioning how the state exercises its punitive power means looking, among others, at the ways in which social groups and concrete subjects are affected by this power, evidencing who, in capitalism, is protected or exposed and captured by control apparatuses. Bruna is an anthropologist and lawyer and, for 20 years, has studied the Brazilian criminal justice system, looking especially at the interactions between it and women, whether they are considered and dealt with as victims or perpetrators. Her work focuses on female imprisonment, motherhood and prison, and women victims of gender violence. Blending her work as an academic and lawyer, Bruna seeks to use the results of her research for concrete social transformations. A successful example was the use of research on motherhood and prison of which she was one of the coordinators in the victorious action in the Brazilian supreme court that reinforced the right of pre-trial prisoners who are mothers to await trial in freedom, or, at least, in home confinement, that is, outside of prison. Currently she is part of the team of The Prison Consensus project, aimed at mapping and discussing the political economy of mass incarceration in Brazil.
Key Publications:
ANGOTTI, Bruna. Da Solidão do Ato à Exposição Judicial: Uma Abordagem antropológica do infanticídio no Brasil. 1. ed. São Paulo - SP: Editora Liber, 2023. [Title in English: From the solitude of the act to judicial exposure: a legal anthropological approach to infanticide in Brazil].
ANGOTTI, Bruna. Entre as leis da Ciência do Estado e de Deus - o surgimento dos presídios femininos no Brasil. 2ª ed. Tucumán: Editorial Humanitas, 2018. [Title in English: Between the laws of science, of the State, and of God – the emergence of female prisons in Brazil].
ANGOTTI, Bruna; BRAGA, A. G.M. Disciplinary excess: from hypermaternity to hypomaternity in Brazilian women's prisons. Revista Sur Internacional de Direitos Humanos, v. 22, p. 1-5, 2016.
PhD Students
Sangeet S. Jain
We’re living in an era of growing demand for novel medicines across the world, with the Global North preoccupied by ageing and chronic diseases and the Global South grappling with infectious diseases and antibiotic resistance. However, the global pharmaceutical industry is organised such that the development of new medicines is commanded entirely by a persistently oligopolistic core of firms located mainly in the United States and Europe i.e. Big Pharma. These firms command global value chains (GVCs) for drug discovery and development and extract a large proportion of the value produced within these chains. There have been protracted attempts over the past few decades by latecomer industrialisers - such as China, India, South Korea, Israel, Singapore - to upgrade within these chains and develop drugs suited to their populations’ needs. However, these countries remain confined to competing mainly within generics markets and providing services for lead firms driving patented pharmaceutical GVCs. Their populations’ access to new medicines still depends on the ability of their local firms to negotiate licensing/technology transfer agreements with big pharmaceutical firms in the Global North. Sangeet’s research, funded by the Cambridge Trust and the Newnham Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, studies the nature of this challenge for latecomer countries by employing an in-depth case study of the Indian pharmaceutical sector’s attempts to break into novel drug development. Most crucially, her research proposes an alternative framework to consider the challenge of climbing the pharmaceutical innovation ladder as she finds that when it comes to confronting the oligopolies dominating high-technology industries, the theoretical frameworks commonly used to study upgrading are of little help to latecomer countries.
Promise Frank Ejiofor
Conflict remains a pressing global problem. Whether it manifests as terrorism, civil war, or ethnonationalist violence, conflict along identitarian lines—ethnicity, gender, religion, and nationality—disrupts social affinities, displaces communities, and engenders social suffering. With a primary focus on Nigeria—and, broadly, Africa—Promise’s research asks how and why conflict occurs and its effects on the most vulnerable members of society. This means an attention to structural violence and its intersection with identitarian divisions in violent settings. Promise’s research in the areas of conflict was awarded the prestigious Cedric Smith Prize by the Conflict Research Society in 2025 for the best piece of conflict research by a PhD candidate.
Key Publications:
Ejiofor, Promise Frank. 2025. The Forest of Reasons: Toward Contextualised Explanations of Gendercide Against Civilian Men and Boys in Conflict Settings. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 1-27.
Ejiofor, Promise Frank. 2025. Multipastism: Collective Memory, Ethnic Conflict, and Anti-Muslim Discrimination in Global Perspective. Critical Sociology, 1-39.
Ejiofor, Promise Frank. 2025. Dread in the Homeland: Symbolic Politics and Ethnonationalist Struggles for Self-Determination in Nigeria. Nations and Nationalism, 1-12.
Fadi Amer
Where does legitimate political power come from and how should it be distributed? In recent centuries, it has been widely accepted that political power flows from and through the collective will of a people group to govern itself, to the exclusion of members of competing groups. Further back in history, political power was instead typically rooted in the secular or divine right of an imperial sovereign to rule, whose ultimate authority defined their subjects’ conditions of life and death. In the case of modern Lebanon, centuries of confessional coexistence under the supreme and capricious authority of the Ottoman Sultan subsequently gave way, in the 19th century, to religious sectarian forms of political representation – and with it, horrific identitarian conflict – which persist to this day. Fadi’s work attempts to make sense of this transformation by adopting a long-term historical view on the political evolution of the religious sect between the national and imperial paradigms briefly described above. His work shows that religious sectarianism can neither be overcome by appealing to a nationalist alternative nor by returning to an imperial past. Instead, he suggests that the Lebanese must strive towards a novel egalitarian paradigm rooted in the fundamental principle of equal citizenship.
Key Publication:
Amer, Fadi. (2021). Sen's Conception of Freedom, and a Conjecture on Embodiment. Theoria, 68(166), 87-112.
Scholarly Awards and Prizes
Ilias’ most recent book, The Spectre of State Capitalism, which is free and open access, has been awarded the best book in International Political Economy 2025 by the British International Studies Association, and shortlisted for the International Studies Association’s best book in Global Development Studies 2025 award.
Marthe’s book ‘Mobility Economies in Europe’s Borderlands: Migrants’ Journeys through Libya and the Mediterranean’ was published with Cambridge University Press in 2023 and is the winner of the 2024 BISA Susan Strange Best Book Prize.
Ilias won the 2025 Aaron Rapport Teaching Prize for excellence in teaching, awarded by the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at Cambridge based on student feedback to the individual who has best informed students’ education in politics and international studies over this past year.
The Atlas of Finance, now translated in 20 languages and co-authored by Julien Migozzi, received the Best Book in Economics award from the Association of American Publishers in 2025. It also won the Gold Medal in the Axiom Business Book Awards, and was named the Best Atlas of the year at both the International Cartographic Association Awards and the British Cartographic Society Awards.
In 2022, Graham Denyer Willis was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize from the Leverhulme Trust. This £100,000 prestigious award is for “For researchers at an early stage of their careers whose work has had international impact and whose future research career is exceptionally promising.”
To Alumni
We would like to hear from you. Please send us stories and news of your trajectories, successes and places in the world. We know that you are in the most incredible places, and doing the most vital things, and we would be thrilled to introduce you.
You contact us at admin@devstudies.cam.ac.uk
Postgraduate Scholarships
Cambridge Development Studies attracts the brightest minds. Yet far too many of the most promising are unable to accept our offers of admission due to financial constraints. Many aspiring scholars, whether in our MPhil or PhD programmes, face significant funding barriers.
These prospective students come from diverse backgrounds, and often from regions most impacted by the very challenges they seek to solve. For them, a scholarship is not just financial support—it is a gateway to opportunity, a bridge to impactful careers, and a chance to drive meaningful change in the world.
The Development Studies Postgraduate Fund was established to address this gap, providing essential financial support for tuition, research, and fieldwork.
The Fund ensures that the future of Cambridge Development Studies remains diverse and inclusive, empowering brilliant minds from all backgrounds to become the next generation of leaders who will address global inequalities and shape the future of sustainable development.
With your support, future scholars and global leaders will be catalysed to drive positive change, amplifying their Cambridge education on a global scale.
For more information, please visit: https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/postgraduate-scholarships-at-the-centre-of-development-studies