Along with Erik Reinert, I’ve published A Modern Guide to Uneven Economic Development. In contrast to mainstream approaches to economics, this Guide addresses the complex reality of economic development as an inherently uneven process, exploring the ways of theorizing and empirically exploring the mechanisms with which the unevenness manifests itself. It covers a wide array of issues influencing wealth and poverty, technological innovation, ecology and sustainability, financialization, population, gender, and geography, considering the dynamics of cumulative causations created by the interplay between these factors.
Category: Economic Development
I have a new article in the Review of International Political Economy with the fabulous co-author team of Ilias Alami, Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi, Annina Kaltenbrunner, Kai Koddenbrock and Jeff Powell. The article (open access) outlines a research agenda for understanding international financial subordination by drawing on the heterodox traditions of dependency theory, Marxism, and Post-Keynesianism.
I recently started a podcast, along with my co-host Basile Boulay! The Hierarchies of Development podcast offers long format interviews focusing on enduring global inequalities. Conversations focus on contemporary research projects by critical scholars from across the world that help us understand how and why structural hierarchies persist.
We have two episodes out so far:
Episode 1: Environmental hierarchies
In the first episode we speak to Tejal Kanitkar (National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India) and Leon Sealey-Huggins (University of Warwick, UK) about climate change and environmental hierarchies. Join us to learn more about the COP26, the racialised dimension of climate change, the issues around the concept of sustainability, and much more.
Episode 2: Labour hierarchies
In this second episode we speak to Rosa Abraham (Azim Premji University, India) and Lucia Pradella (King’s College, London, UK) about their respective work on the Indian labour market and the political economy of work in the Mediterranean region. Join us to reflect on some key contemporary issues surrounding work and migration, including the role of gender and imperialism.
Follow the podcast on your preffered platform to get information on the next few episodes (see here).
The podcast is supported by King’s College, London, the European Association for Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) and the Developing Economics blog, with special editing support from Jonas Bauhof.

I recently wrote an essay about Samir Amin for the popular magainze, Aeon. In it, I go through what I think are major lessons from Samir Amin that can help us understand imperialism, Eurocentrism, uneven development, and ideology better. I contrast his structural and materialist analysis of capitalism and imperialism with the culturalist views of Edward Said, as Said has received much more attention in both academia and in the public sphere. Read the essay here.
Read a Spanish translation of the article here (Letras Libres) and a Persian translation here.
I have a new working paper in the Greenwich Papers in Political Economy series with the fabulous and rich co-author team: Ilias Alami, Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi, Annina Kaltenbrunner, Kai Kodddenbrock and Jeff Powell. Together we’ve been working on systematizing and defining a critical research agenda on international financial subordination for a while now. We welcome feedback.
In April, I had the pleasure of speaking at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) seminar series. I drew on both my research on dependency theory as a research programme and my work on finance in imperialism in Senegal and Ghana (with Kai Koddenbrock and Ndongo Samba Sylla). The talk was chaired by Antonio Andreoni (IIPP), and Sophie Van Huellen (SOAS) was the discussant.

I wrote a blog post for Developing Economics with Carolina Alves and Daniela Gabor on some of the revisionist takes on the consequences of the Washington Consensus. Check it out.

Along with Maria Dyveke Styve and Ushehwedu Kufakurinani, I edited a special issue in Review of African Political Economy on Samir Amin’s work and its relevance for contemporary problems.
You can read our introductory editorial here: Samir Amin and beyond: the enduring relevance of Amin’s approach to political economy. We also wrote a blog post about the issue that you can find here.

Key Questions on Global Inequality is an interview series that forces academics to consider how our own upbringings and positionalities affect how we see the world. Here is the interview they did with me, where I dig into how my own childhood led me to see and challenge global inequality in particular ways, and how this in turn eventually led me to heterodox economics and debt justice work.
I recently published a new article in Community Development, along with Kai Koddenbrock and Ndongo Samba Sylla. In the article, Financial subordination and uneven financialisation in 21st century Africa, we ask how the global process of financialization has unfolded across the continent and what it means for relations of dependence. The empirical analysis of aggregate country data shows that financialization is, at best, an uneven and patchy process in the region, not a general structural shift in the way capital accumulation is organized.

