Research Associates
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 of Geography, Environment, and Asian Studies at the University of Utah. Her research lies at the intersection of critical development studies, political ecology, and economic geography. She contributes to debates on global China’s role in shaping global capitalism, resource politics, and development, particularly in Asia. She is a co-founder of The Observatory. More Info.
Dr. Ilias Alami is a political economist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Uppsala University. He held a postdoctoral research position at Maastricht University and a lectureship in International Politics at the University of Manchester. His interests lie in global political economy, state capitalism, economic geography, development and international capital flows, North-South relations, geographies of global finance, theories of the state, and the articulations between race/class/coloniality. More info.
Dr. Mustafa Bayırbağ is an urban planner and associate professor in Department of Political Science and Public Administration, and Urban Policy Planning and Local Government Graduate Program, of 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. 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 (Columbia UP). His current project focuses on China's growing role as a financier of development projects across the world via the BRI. 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, lead by PI Adam Dixon. More info.
Dr. Nicholas Loubere is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University. He focuses on contemporary China and its global manifestations. He is also engaged in work related to the field of China Studies more broadly, and am involved in the Open Access movement, particularly as a co-editor of the Made in China Journal, Global China Pulse Journal, and The People’s Map of Global China. 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 F. Farahani (Ali) 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.
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. Julie Miao is an Associate Professor in Property and Economic Development in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Fellow, a visiting scholar of the Asian Center at Harvard University (2022-2023), and an Honorary Fellow in Shanghai Jiaotong University and Henan University, China. 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. Johannes Petry a political economist and postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfort, researching the changing dynamics of financial globalisation and its impact on the norms, institutions and power dynamics that underpin the global economy. His main focus is China’s economic rise and other post-crisis transformation of the global financial system. 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 policy related to environmental and economic security. Broadly, 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. 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. 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 Saguier works at the School of Politics and Government, National University of San Martin (UNSAM). He is a researcher at Argentina's National Scientific and Technical Research Council. His research focuses on the international political economy of the environment. More info.
Maximiliano Vila Seoane is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina. He is a professor at the School of Politics & Government 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 and management at Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. He is part of a joint-PhD program with 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. 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. 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.
Miklós Sebők is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of Social Sciences, Budapest. He studies political economy & macroeconomic policy 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. He is the co-editor of Policy Agendas in Autocracy, and Hybrid Regimes: The Case of Hungary (Palgrave, 2021).
Dr. Paolo Balmas is Research Fellow at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), Department of Urban Development and Mobility. 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 in Political Science at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. He is also affiliated with the International Relations Research Center at the University of São Paulo (NUPRI-USP) and the Center for International Studies and Analyses at São Paulo State University (NEAI-UNESP). His research interests span security studies, foreign policy analysis, and political regimes, with a focus on emerging powers, notably Brazil and China (including Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan).
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. Eduardo Viola is Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Sao Paulo, and Professor of International Relations at University of Brasilia and Getulio Vargas Foundation. His research areas are 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.