Co-Founders
Dr. Seth Schindler is Senior Lecturer in Urban Development and Transformation in the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. His work examines large-scale urban and regional transformation initiatives that integrate cities into transnational urban systems. He is a co-founder of The Observatory. More Info.
Dr. Jessica DiCarlo is an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah. She is a human geographer and ethnographer who writes on Global China, infrastructure, and resource politics. She is a co-founder of The Observatory and a Public Intellectual Program Fellow with the National Committee for US-China Relations. More Info.
Research Associates
Dr. Nick Jepson is the Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Global Development Institute and School of Environment, Education and Development at the University of Manchester. He studies the political-economic implications of the rise of China and is the author of In China's Wake. His current project focuses on China's growing role as a financier of development projects across the world via the BRI. More info.
Dr. Steven Rolf is an ESRC Research Fellow at the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre at the University of Sussex. He is a political economist and examines the digitalisation of economies, transformations of work, the rise of platforms, and the territorial and political implications of these changes. He recently concluded an interdisciplinary project entitled ‘China and the transformation of global capitalism.’ More info.
Dr. Ilias Alami is University Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge. Prior, he held research and teaching positions at Uppsala University, Maastricht University, and Manchester University. His interests lie in global political economy, state capitalism, economic geography, development and international capital flows, geographies of global finance, state theories, and the articulations between race/class/coloniality. More info.
Dr. Mustafa Bayırbağ is an urban planner and professor of Political Science, Urban Policy, and Local Government Graduate Program at the Middle East Technical University. His interests lie at the intersection of urban/regional studies and public policy. State spatiality and the political economy of social exclusion cut across his research on urbanization, state rescaling, urban governance, the BRI, and development. More info.
Louis Cyuzuzo is a president's doctoral scholar at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on Chinese and Japanese-led port projects: the Lamu Port and the Dongo Kundu SEZ, in Lame and Mombasa, Kenya. The project offers a comparative study through a close analysis of their effects on the two cities and how urban agglomerations affect projects. More info.
Dr. Meredith DeBoom is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina. Her research examines how Africans are engaging with geopolitical, environmental, and demographic transitions, with a focus on distributive politics, violence, ‘green’ extractivism, and low-carbon energy transitions. More info.
Dr. Agnes Gagyi is a research fellow at the University of Gothenburg, Department of Sociology and Work Studies. Her research focuses on East European politics & social movements from the perspective of the region’s world market and geopolitical integration. Her previous work involved comparative perspectives on economic crisis, political mobilization, and reorganization of expert knowledge structures during changes in modes of world market integration. More info
Dr. Elisa Gambino is Lecturer in Global Development – Global Political Economy at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester and Adjunct Researcher at the Centre for Asian Studies at the University of Ghana. Her research focuses on the intersection between China’s outward economic engagement and Africa’s development trajectories. More Info.
Dr. Shahar Hameiri is Professor of International Politics and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland. His work has mainly examined the politics of security and development in Asia and the Pacific. He is particularly interested in state transformation and its interrelations with shifts in the global political economy. More info.
Dr. Tim Zajontz is a lecturer in International Relations and Global Political Economy at the Technische Universität Dresden, and a Research Fellow in the Centre for International and Comparative Politics at Stellenbosch University. More info.
Dr. Tom Chodor is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the School of Social Sciences, Monash University. His research focuses on the global governance of the global political economy, specifically the role of private actors in contributing to and contesting global policy agendas, and the transformation and global institutions in an era of fragmentation and breakdown of world order. More info.
Imogen T. Liu is a PhD candidate at Maastricht University with research interests spanning state capital, financialisation, sovereign wealth funds, infrastructure development, EU-China relations, and the political economy of China. Her dissertation seeks to answer the question, How does Chinese state capital transnationalise? She is a member of the ERC project, SWFsEUROPE, led by Adam Dixon. More info.
Dr. Julian Germann is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations (IR) at the University of Sussex. His research explores how globalisation is changing amidst growing US-China competition, with a focus on how Europe and Germany are affected by and responding to these dynamics. More Info.
Dr. Emma Mawdsley is Professor of Human Geography and Fellow of Newnham College at the University of Cambridge. Her interests lie in the politics (broadly interpreted) of international development, with a particular interest in South-South development cooperation, and how this phenomenon and other national and global shifts are affecting the (so-called) 'traditional' donors. More info.
Dr. Alireza (Ali) F. Farahani has a PhD in geography from Clark University and is an independent researcher and policy analyst in urban and regional development. I am working on a proposal on Trade corridors and urban development in the age of the second cold war in West Asia: a study of border cities and peripheral urban areas in Iran and Turkey. More info.
Tin Hinane El Kadi is a PhD student at the London School of Economics and researches the developmental implications of China's Digital Silk Road in North Africa. Using mixed methods, her PhD looks at how the expansion of Chinese digital capital shapes opportunities for technological upgrading in Egypt and Algeria. She is currently an associate fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House. More info.
Dr. Irna Hofman is a rural sociologist specialising in agrarian political economy and social change in Central Asia, and a research associate at the University of Oxford. Her research sits at the intersection of political economy, political geography, and political ecology, and cover a broad range of themes: everyday geopolitics, agrarian and social change, labour, gender, and Global China and its role in global agrifood markets. More info.
Dr. Selver B. Sahin is a professor of Political Science and IR at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She has more than fifteen years of teaching, research and project management experience gained in Türkiye, Australia and New Zealand. Her research focuses on the socio-political dynamics of development. More info.
Dr. Lee Jones is Professor of Political Economy and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on political economy, development, security, and the transformation of states, particularly with reference to Southeast Asia and China. More info.
Dr. Lela Rekhviashvili is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, specialising in political economy and regional geography in post-socialist Eastern Europe and Eurasia. She is interested in transformations of capitalism and its contestation. Her research increasingly focuses on contestation over infrastructure-led development and the role of infrastructure in imagining and (re)claiming socialist and capitalist modernities.
Kang Li is a human geography PhD student at the University of Utah. His research centers on the critical study of China's global engagements in urban and infrastructural development. He has earned degrees in Sociology and Urban Planning in China and the UK. Before his PhD, Kang was a planning consultant for several major Belt and Road Initiative projects in Asia and Africa commissioned by Chinese SOEs.
Aaron Magunna is a PhD student at the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. His research focuses primarily on how India and Japan respond to China-US competition by adapting their security, trade, and technology policies. Aaron is specifically interested in state transformation dynamics and evolving state-capital relations.
Tamás Gerőcs is a political economist and historical sociologist, finishing his PhD at the State University of New York in Binghamton. He is interested in semi-peripheral development with a focus on domestic capital in the automotive industry in Central and Eastern Europe, trade and technology, labor relations and asymmetrical vertical specialization. Gerőcs is interested in methodological questions within world-systems’, dependency and global value-chain theories.
Dr. Trissia Wijaya is a McKenzie Research Fellow, Asia Institute, the University of Melbourne, and an Honorary Research Fellow at Indo-Pacific Research Centre, Murdoch University, Australia. She has PhD in Politics from Murdoch University and studies the political economy of energy transitions, infrastructure financing, and China-Indonesia relations .
Hannah McNicol is a PhD Researcher at the University of Melbourne and University of Manchester and affiliate of the Global Development Institute. She studies Special Economic Zones in the context of China's Belt and Road Initiative and the ‘Second’ Global Cold War. More info.
Dr. Joscha Abels is a political economist and postdoc at the Institute of Political Science, University of Tübingen. He focuses on infrastructure and geoeconomic competition, the global role of the EU, and the transformation of state-business relations. His current research focuses on communication, from submarine cables to satellite constellations." More info.
Dr. Maximilian Mayer is Junior-Professor of International Relations and Global Politics of Technology at University of Bonn. His interests include the global politics of science, innovation, and technology; China’s foreign and energy policy; global energy and climate politics; theories of International Relations. More info.
Dr. Cynthia Mehboob is a doctoral scholar in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University. Her doctoral research interrogates the interplay between human, non-human, and more-than-human elements that shape Australia's critical infrastructure securitisation, with a focus on the techno-politics of undersea cables in the Indo-Pacific. More info.
Dr. Albert Sanghoon Park is a Lecturer at the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. He specialises in the geopolitics of knowledge production, tying academic and policy ideas to their surrounding political and material contexts. His current project examines the geopolitics of resilience related to environmental and economic security. His interests lie at the crossroads of international development, international relations, and public policy. More info.
Philip Nock is a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies (CASSIS) at the University of Bonn, where he also pursues his Ph.D. His interests include international security and technology, US-China relations, and international order. More info.
Dr. Yawei Zhao is a Lecturer in Socio-Cultural Geography at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on internal migration, urban in/formality, speculative urbanism, digital technologies, the informal economy, affordable housing, and China.
Dr. Sean Kenji Starrs is Lecturer of International Development at King's College London. His research attempts to reconceptualize national power in the age of globalization by encompassing transnational corporate power, with particular attention to hegemonic competition between China and the United States, including over advanced technology. More info
Dr. Marcelo I. Saguier is Professor of International Relations & Director of the MA-PhD in the School of Politics & Government, National University of San Martin, and a Research Fellow at Argentina’s National Scientific & Technical Research Council. He researches the international political economy of the environment and visual politics of sustainability and extractivism, particularly in Latin America. He has a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Warwick. More info.
Dr. Maximiliano Vila Seoane is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina. He is a professor at the School of Politics & Gov’t of the National University of San Martín. His interests span cybersecurity, international politics, and development Currently, he is interested in how the intensifying rivalry between the US and China is transforming digital capitalism, particularly in Latin America. More info.
Dr. Kevin Ward is Professor of Human Geography and Director of the Manchester Urban Institute. He is an urban geographer with interests in the financing and governance of cities. More info.
Gilead Teri is a PhD researcher in international development policy at the University of Manchester and University of Toronto. His research explores the interplay of finance, investment and urban development in East Africa focusing on a comparative analysis of Chinese and non-Chinese transport infrastructure projects and their urban impacts in Kenya and Tanzania. More info.
Dr. Miklós Sebők is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of Social Sciences, Budapest. He studies political economy in Central and Eastern Europe. His work has appeared in, inter alia, Business and Politics, East European Politics, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Public Policy & Socio-Economic Review.
Dr. Jack Taggart is a Lecturer in International Political Economy at Queen’s University Belfast. His research focuses on contestations in global economic governance, the geopolitics and dynamics of international development, and corporate power in global environmental politics. More Info.
Aaditee Kudrimoti is a PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group and Urban Planning at UC Berkeley, interested in the influence of major themes in global politics on the subnational politics of planning natural resource-intensive sectors. Her recent work explores the relationship between U.S.-China competition and energy sector planning in Southeast Asia. More info.
Dr. Eduardo Viola is Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Univaersity of Sao Paulo, and Professor of IR at University of Brasilia. He researches International Political Economy of Climate Change, globalization & governance, Brazilian foreign policy. He has published seven books and over eighty peer-reviewed articles, with more than 6,800 citations . More Info.
Johannes Manuel Lüdorf Iparraguirre is a PhD candidate at the University of Freiburg. His research interests include the European Union’s quest for economic security in the context of great power rivalry, geoeconomics and negotiation dynamics within and between EU institutions.
Mingchun Xu is a PhD researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. She explores the geopolitics of South-South development cooperation with a focus on China. Her PhD dissertation looks at China’s role in the BRICS+ and the group’s the economic and political implications for the global South. More info.
Dr. Paolo Balmas is Research Fellow at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research. An economic geographer, his research interests lie at the intersections of the geographies of money and finance, (development) banking, and geopolitics. His main research focus is China’s global economic expansion, and China’s gradual integration in the global financial system.
Dr. Richard Heeks is Professor of Digital Development and Director of the Centre for Digital Development at the University of Manchester. His research interests include China’s digital expansion in the Global South, digital transformation, data justice and digital equity. More info
Henoch Gabriel Mandelbaum is a PhD student at the University of São Paulo, and affiliated with the International Relations Research Center and the Center for International Studies and Analyses at São Paulo State University. His interests span security studies, foreign policy analysis, and political regimes, focusing on emerging powers, notably Brazil and China broadly.
Dr. Joseph Baines is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at King’s College London. His work principally focusses on corporate power in global supply chains. He has produced research on areas such as the agri-food system, commodity trading, corporate debt, corporate taxation, financialization, and the tech conflict. More Info.
Dr. Ceren Ergenc is a research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies and an affiliated researcher at the East Asian Studies and Research Centre, Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her research interests include China's domestic and international policy processes, China’s investments in the greater European area, industrial policymaking, participatory governance, and urban politics. More Info.
Dr. Hezron Makundi is a Lecturer in Development Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam. His Ph.D from KU Leuven, Belgium focused on technology transfer and technological capacity building in Tanzania under the Chinese development cooperation. Hezron’s research interests includes international technology transfer, development impact evaluation and the politics of aid. More Info.
Dr. Giorgian Guțoiu is a teaching assistant in sociology at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Bucharest. His interests lie in the geopolitics and geoeconomics of urbanization, climate change, and state capitalism and how these unfold, particularly in Eastern Europe.
Matias Castrén is a PhD student at the University of Heidelberg’s South Asia Institute. His research interests include Global Political Economy, Security Studies, Transnationalism, and Intellectual History. Matias’s doctoral thesis focuses on theorizing the emerging transnational sphere in global politics and seeks to understand and explain India’s strategies for integrating into global economic hierarchies. More info.