Ingrid's website
Really glad to have my Back to Dakar paper (originally published in Review of International Political Economy) with Felipe Antunes de Oliveira now published in Spanish in Cuadernos De TeorÃa Social. You can read it here. It’s part of a special issue on dependency theory edited by MartÃn Arboleda, Francisca BenÃtez & Alonso López.
We have finally published our book! It’s been a long-time coming and we’re excited to finally share it with the world. You can order it here. If you’re keen to write a review, let me know and I can ask Polity to send you a reviewer’s copy.
Here’s the blurb:
Decolonization has long been debated across the social sciences, but the economics discipline has so far avoided such critical engagement. This book provides a much-needed intervention.
Dutt, Alves, Kesar, and Kvangraven uncover the deeply Eurocentric foundations that shape how economists study the world today. These have rendered the discipline ill-equipped to tackle critical questions, such as structural racism, uneven development, the climate crisis, labour relations, and how structural power shapes economic outcomes. Decolonizing economics entails challenging the norms of neutrality and objectivity that economists claim to speak from, while fostering alternative ways of understanding the economy that take seriously structural power relations and contemporary processes of economic development. Readers will come to understand the political stakes of decolonization and the wide range of scholarship that already exists that can help us grasp economics from non-Eurocentric perspectives. Through such scholarship, we can gain an enriched understanding of capitalism and its relationship to exploitation, colonialism, and racialization.
And here are reviews of the book:
Reorienting the Economic Debate, by Robert Bigg, July 2025
This new article in World Development interrogates how Eurocentrism is reflected in the Economics discipline’s approach to mining as well as in global mining policy. It then puts forward an alternative, South-centered understanding of mining, which is explored through a historical view of the Obuasi mine, which has been mined by AngloGold Ashanti in Ghana since 1897. The article is part of a special issue I’m co-editing on Decolonising Economic Development with Surbhi Kesar.
At a time when ‘decolonisation’ has become a buzzword in the international development industry and beyond, it is an opportune moment to assess what a decolonisation framework for the international non-governmental organisation (INGO) sector would entail. In this new report, Surbhi Kesar and I discuss what Eurocentrism is and how it can help us critically interrogate the role of INGOs in the development industry. You can read some reporting about our research here:
In response to the announcement of the Economics Nobel being awarded to Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (commonly referred to as “AJR”), I wrote a commentary for Economic and Political weekly with my co-authors Surbhi Kesar and Devika Dutt.
Here is the link to the piece and you can download the PDF for free here.
You can also read the piece in French, Persian and Portuguese.
Carolina Alves and I have recently launced a new blog series on Decolonising Economics on the Developing Economics blog. Have a look at our introduction and the contributions thus far here.
I recently contributed to a very interesting symposium curated by Stefan Ouma and Christine Vogt-William: Reconfiguring African Studies, reconfiguring economics: centring intersectionality and social stratification in the journal Critical African Studies. It centered on a discussion of Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s book Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa and includes contributions by Obeng-Odoom himself, the curators, Abena D. Oduro, Tanita J. Lewis, Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, Sara Stevano, and myself.
I published a new article in the Review of International Political Economy with my co-author Felipe Antunes de Oliveira. The abstract:
Whereas the field of International Political Economy (IPE) included a diversity of voices at its outset, histories of the field tend to marginalize certain contributions – particularly those from the Global South. The endeavor to decolonize IPE offers an opportunity to look back at IPE’s history, re-discover the marginalized voices, and imagine new possible futures. This article engages with contemporary calls to decolonize IPE and proposes an alternative route to do so by recovering dependency theory. We argue that dependency theory can be conceptualized as a peripheral IPE perspective that was committed to thinking from the Global South and to producing politically engaged scholarship just as the field was being formed. The article elaborates on the key tenets of dependency theory, contrasting it with mainstream IPE, and putting it in dialogue with decolonial approaches. To demonstrate the simultaneous non-Eurocentric, anti-colonial, and policy-oriented potential of dependency theory, we recover a foundational moment that disciplinary histories of IPE have forgotten: the 1972 Dakar conference, organized by Samir Amin, with the participation of leading Latin American and African dependency scholars.
I was recently on a plenary sponsored by the Development Studies Association (DSA) in Manchester with Kamna Patel, Sara Stevano and Indrajit Roy, where we were each asked to answer the above question. Along with the organizers, Pritish Behuria and Tom Goodfellow, we have now published the plenary discussion on the DSA blog:
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