About
I am a Professor of Global Studies at Shanghai University and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
I have previously taught at LSE, University College London (UCL) and Cambridge University, and held Visiting Scholar positions at the University of Rome
‘La Sapienza’, the University of Basel, and Addis Abeba University, Ethiopia.
My work centres on global critical theory and the dynamics of progressive social change. I am driven by a desire to make the world a better place for all and a belief that critical analysis and engaged scholarship can make a contribution to that goal.
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I started my academic career in the 1990s with a BA in Anthropology at Cambridge University and then a PhD in Social Anthropology at the LSE, under the supervision of Maurice Bloch and James Woodburn. I was interested in non-hierarchical societies and wanted to explore how the basic elements of social hierarchy are constructed, challenged and transformed. To explore these issues I carried out two years of ethnographic research in a remote rural community high in the mountains of southwest Ethiopia, in an area that at that time was only very loosely incorporated into either the Ethiopian state or the world capitalist economy. It was a fascinating and formative experience to live in a largely pre-capitalist, or non-capitalist, society, and to come to understand the intricate complexities of traditional sociality, hierarchy and political-ritual-economy.
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In the years since then this part of Ethiopia, the Gamo Highlands, has become increasingly drawn into the Ethiopian state and the world economy. Development NGOs, missionaries and Ethiopian entrepreneurs arrived, leading to wide-ranging social, religious and economic change as cash crops were introduced, modern education was expanded and vast numbers of villagers converted to Pentecostal Christianity. Maintaining an ongoing relationship with ‘my village’ and ‘my family’, with frequent short visits over the years, I was able to observe these changes from the inside and to experience many of the ‘growing pains’ of international development alongside the community.
In these years I also started to carry out consultancy work for various international development NGOs working with rural communities in other parts of Ethiopia, focussing mainly on projects around value chain development, cooperatives and fair trade. These projects were very similar to the ones being carried out in ‘my village’ and it was eye-opening to see these interventions from a very different perspective. ‘Seeing like an NGO’ and ‘seeing like a villager’ are so different. All this of course led to my academic writing about the transformation of subjectivities and social systems in contemporary Africa, the dynamics of religious change, and the anthropology of international development.
As I got more deeply involved in the international development industry, and saw first-hand its many flaws and problems, I began to ask why it was organised in this way. My questions were not so much about strategy or efficiency, but rather about how the ‘international community’ supposedly seeks to reduce global poverty and inequality. This led me to broader questions about how global poverty and inequality were constructed in the first place and maintained through the structure and workings of the current international order. And thus the scale of my research expanded, from a small village in Ethiopia to Africa to international development and then to questions of world order.
Since the mid-2010s I have been working to develop a global critical theory, or perhaps a global anthropology, seeking to analyse the world as one social system. Drawing on many of the same tools that anthropologists used to use to understand the structures and dynamics of small-scale traditional societies, I seek to understand why the world is structured this way, whose interests it serves, how it came to be this way, and perhaps most importantly, how it could be organised in different, more just and more equal ways. This takes me beyond anthropology, into the realms of political theory, critical political-economy, international relations, international law, world systems theory, global history, critical geography and transnational social movement studies.
I am currently working on three research projects:
The first is an edited book project about the Global Left. It seeks to explore past and present conceptualisations and manifestations of the ‘global left’ and to consider what progressive left visions of globalisation and world order might look like.
The second project focuses on one of these possible visions of the global(ist) left - the idea of a democratic world government with universal world citizenship, open borders and global economic redistribution. I explore the history of the mid-twentieth century World Government Movement in the Global South and consider the important role of global south politicians and intellectuals in shifting international discussions from a narrow focus on war and peace to broader questions of how to re-order the world so that all of the world’s population could be ‘free from want’.
My third project explores contemporary struggles of the global left through a political ethnography of the UN Human Rights Council’s Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group on Transnational Corporations and Human Rights, in which global South states and a large alliance of transnational NGOs and social movements seek to create counter-hegemonic international law to regulate TNCs.