Alastair started following the work of Nikia Clarke, University of Oxford, Politics and International Relations.
Alastair started following the work of 15 people.
Alastair changed an About section.
Faculty Member, Politics and International Studies (POLIS)
Philomathia Fellow in African Politics
Trinity Hall
About
I research and teach politics, focusing on the political economy of Southern Africa. I am based at the University of Cambridge, and am Director of Studies for Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies (PPSIS) at Trinity Hall www.trinhall.cam.ac.uk. I am a member of the Managers’ Committee of the Centre of African Studies www.african.cam.ac.uk and of the Editorial Working Group of the Review of African Political Economy www.roape.org.
In 2011-2012 I will lecture and supervise undergraduate students taking;
- Introduction to Politics (Part 1, Paper 1)
- International Relations (Part 1, Paper 5)
- Comparative Politics (Pol 4)
- The Politics of Security and Development (Pol 7)
- Ethics and World Politics (Pol 3)
- The Politics of Africa (Pol 9)
Further details, including reading lists for all of these courses are available at www.ppsis.cam.ac.uk.
I also supervise dissertations for undergraduate students in PPSIS and graduate students in Politics, International Relations and African Studies, and am always happy to discuss supervising research that has some connection to my own work. My main interests are in how Western aid donors, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and multinational companies promote their preferred economic and social agendas in Africa, and particularly in African popular and elite responses to these influences.
For the last couple of years I have been engaged in collaborative work on the copper mining industry in Zambia. I co-wrote 'For Whom the Windfalls?' in 2007 and for the following two years wrote a regular blog which is now archived at http://minewatchzambia.blogspot.com/. In September 2008 I organised the first MineWatchZambia conference in Oxford. The conference inspired an edited volume which I edited with Miles Larmer and which was published by Palgrave MacMillan in January 2011. http://us.macmillan.com/zambiaminingandneoliberalism
“This uncommonly tight, timely, and intellectually sharp volume sets the recent history of boom and bust in the Zambian mining economy in a longer historical timeframe. Its key contribution lies in demonstrating precisely why neo-liberal orthodoxies have served Zambia so poorly.”
Paul Nugent, Professor of Comparative African History, University of Edinburgh, UK
In 2008 I worked with the Global Economic Governance Programme at Oxford University (GEG) on the ‘Negotiating Aid’ project, which assessed the strategies adopted by African governments to wrest control from donors in aid relationships. I contributed several chapters to the resulting book: 'The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Negotiating with Donors', Oxford University Press, 2008. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Politics-Aid-African-Strategies-Dealing/dp/019
The 'working papers' on this site all relate to this project.
My doctoral thesis discussed the rise of 'participation' as an organising principle of international development assistance, and the impact of its implementation over the last decade by Western donors and NGOs on Zambia's political economy. I considered particularly the impact of involvement in developing a World Bank funded Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) on both Zambian civil society organisations and on the personal ideology of clergy, women’s activists, trade unionists and development NGO workers.
While I remain interested in aid negotiations, donors, NGOs, unions, and mining, I am increasingly focused on grassroots political expression and organisation and on populism, considering whether popular frustrations with technocratic forms of governance in Southern Africa are finding party-political expression. This research will build on the article 'Of Cabbages and King Cobra' published with Miles Larmer in 2008 (and available via the link in 'papers') and will in the first place result in a study of the 2011 Zambian Presidential and Parliamentary elections.
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', here: http://cambridge.academia.edu/AlastairFraser/Papers/82718/The_False_Pr
If you want to understand my thinking on the relationship between participation and tyranny, the simplest thing to listen to my presentation starting 25:00 minutes into the podcast here:
http://cambridge.academia.edu/AlastairFraser/Papers/676492/Participati
Contact Information
| Address: | Trinity Hall |
| Telephones: |
+44 (0)1223 746615 +44 (0)7946 496503 |
| IM: | skype: alastairfraser |
