Faculty Member, Politics and International Studies (POLIS)
Philomathia Fellow and College Lecturer in Politics
Trinity Hall
About
I am a fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
I teach:
- Part 1 Paper 1 'The Analysis of Modern Politics'.
- Part 2 Paper 7 'The Politics of Security and Development'
- I also supervise long essays called Pol 5, and final year undergraduate dissertations.
Further details and reading lists for all courses are available at http://www.ppsis.cam.ac.uk/current/undergraduate/paperguides.html
I am always happy to discuss supervising undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations that have some connection to my own research interests.
I research the relationship between Africa and the West. I am interested in how donor governments, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and multinational companies promote their preferred economic and social agendas, and particularly in African responses to these influences.
I have recently been involved in three projects:
1. I have just completed doctoral research which discusses the rise of 'participation' as a central feature of international development assistance, and consider the impact of its implementation over the last decade by Western donors and NGOs on Zambia's political economy. This work considers particularly the impact of involvement in developing Zambia’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) on both civil society organisations and on the personal ideology of Zambian clergy, women’s activists, trade unionists and development NGO workers.
2. In 2008 I was involved in collaborative research with the Global Economic Governance (GEG) Programme’s ‘Negotiating Aid’ project, which assesses the strategies adopted by African governments to wrest control from donors in aid relationships. I contributed several chapters to: 'The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Negotiating with Donors', Oxford University Press, 2008. The 'working papers' on this site all relate to this project. If you want to know roughly what I think about aid, the simplest thing to read is the short, 'The false promise of the ownership agenda', in the 'papers' section of this site.
3. For the last couple of years I have also been engaged in collaborative work on the copper mining industry in Zambia. For two years I wrote a regular blog on the website set up to distribute the 2006 ‘For Whom the Windfalls?’ report - available at www.minewatchzambia.com. In September 2008 I organised the first MineWatchZambia conference in Oxford. Some of the papers from this conference will be published in the next year in a book I am currently editing with Miles Larmer. The papers presented at the conference are available on the MineWatchZambia website.
My next research project looks at the issue of populism, considering whether it can be understood as an expression of popular frustrations with techocratic forms of governance in Southern Africa. This work builds theoretically on the article 'Of Cabbages and King Cobra' published with Miles Larmer in 2008 (and available via the link in 'papers').
Contact Information
Trinity Hall
Cambridge
CB2 1TJ
+44 7946 496503
skype: alastairfraser
