Global Political Economy MA Academic Leadership Team
Dr Charlie Dannreuther
Dr Charlie Dannreuther explores the relationship between global and local political economy and promotes a diversity of approaches to political economy. Beginning with studies of small business policy in the UK and the EU he has contributed to the development of local, national and EU policy on SMEs as well as delivering training across Eastern Europe until the financial crash. This work on SMEs focused on the construction of entrepreneurship in political debates in the UK and EU using a range of political economy approaches, including regulationist approaches, and methods, including corpus linguistics. From 2011 Charlie led a COST Action on the financial crash and its systemic risks that introduced concepts like shadow banking to the European political economy debate and then became General Secretary of the European Association of Evolutionary Political Economy. Since BREXIT his work has focused on post human and post colonial forms of political economy to examine the political economy of water, local government debt and recently of performance in political economy. Drawing on innovations in community based pedagogic Charlie established the Centre for Teaching Innovation and Scholarship and now leads the Global Political Economy MA at the University of Leeds.
Charlie is currently writing a book on the Public Works and Loans Board that tracks the origins of the British welfare capitalism from its colonial origins to the crises it faces in the C21st. His recent work has featured in the Review of Evolutionary Political Economy in papers on power and the future of work and a Performance and Political Economy Framework with Shirin Rai.
Dr Geoff Goodwin
Dr Geoff Goodwin draws on various academic disciplines to research and teach GPE, including politics, economics, anthropology, geography, and history, and uses a range of qualitative methods, especially interviews, observation, and archives. His research interests include water, land, infrastructure, socioecological change, and (post) capitalism. He primarily conducts research in Ecuador and Colombia but has also researched in England and India and is a co-investigator on a ESRC-FAPESP funded project on river politics and activism in Brazil.
He is currently finishing a book manuscript - 'Reimagining Karl Polanyi: Pathways Through and Beyond Capitalism' (Bloomsbury) - and has published extensively on Polanyian theory.
Before joining POLIS, Dr Goodwin studied at UCL and Leeds then taught at the London School of Economics, University of Oxford, and University College London, and was also a Research Associate at FLACSO, Ecuador.
Goodwin, G (2026) ‘Understanding the Roles of Decommodification in Socioecological Transformations: A New Theoretical Approach’, New Political Economy
Goodwin, G (2025) ‘Radical (Re) Readings of Polanyi: Splitting Hairs and Building Bridges. Globalizations
Goodwin, G (2024) ‘Dilemmas for the Ecuadorian Left in the Shadow of Correa. Radical Americas
Goodwin, G (2024) ‘Uneven Decommodification Geographies: Exploring Variation Across the Centre and Periphery’. EPA: Economy and Space
Dr Omar Al Shehabi
Before joining the University of Leeds, Omar Al Shehabi was Visiting Associate Professor at the Sociology Department at the University of British Columbia during 2020-2022. Prior to that I was Associate Professor in Political Economy at GUST University and the Founding Director of the Gulf Centre for Development Policies in Kuwait. Omar studied at Oxford before working at the IMF, the World Bank, and McKinsey & Co and is currently on the editorial board of International Studies Review, Contemporary Arab Affairs, and Al-Mustaqbal Al-Arabi. He is also a founding editor of the book series Radical Histories of the Middle East by OneWorld publishers.
Omar explores the intersections of labour, land, and money. He is interested in how regimes of accumulation are sustained materially and ideationally within global capitalism as an overarching structure, situating critical political economy within a historical-geographical approach. Particularly, he uses the prism of the Gulf, broadly defined spatially, to examine the international economic and political processes that drove its transformation from pearling and entrepot towns to oil-exporting monarchies, both inside and beyond their borders. He likes to engage with wider discussions on the construction of transnational capital markets, South-South migration, the political ecology of urban transformations, legacies of colonialism, absolutist modes of governance, oil-based modes of economic growth, and the intellectual and political currents that emerge within them.
Dr Christine Harlen
Christine has a BA in History and an MA and PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University in the United States. She was a visiting researcher at the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University and her main interests are international political economy and comparative political economy. She conducts research on how US political thought, particularly its nationalist and populist strands, affects US relations with the outside world. She has written on how the United States' sense of having an exceptional mission has shaped US attitudes towards Americans abroad and now works on publications examining the politics surrounding the US government’s attempts to promote technological competitiveness since the 1970s.
Dr Clare Robertson-Barlow
Clare is an interdisciplinary social scientist specialising in just transitions and industrial decarbonisation. With over 10 years of experience as a political economist, she has concentrated on energy transitions and climate-compatible development across the Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America, with a particular focus on China's role in regional and global energy dynamics. She was awarded a British Academy grant for exploring just energy transitions in the Asia-Pacific, emphasising distributed energy systems in ASEAN and co-chairs the University of Leeds’ Just Transitions Taskforce, aimed at integrating principles of justice into the university’s climate initiatives.
Before tenure at the University of Leeds, she worked extensively with policy research organisations in Washington, D.C., including the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) and the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS). As Assistant Director for Trade, Economic & Energy Affairs at NBR, she led a global network of experts focusing on the nexus of energy consumption and economic growth, with special projects examining China’s impact on regional markets. She continues to serve as a Non-Resident Fellow at NBR, offering insights on Chinese energy policy, the dynamics of energy transitions, and the broader political economy of decarbonisation. Additionally, she is a RESI Affiliate for the Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative at the Overseas Development Institute.
Her work has resulted in contributions to five books and numerous policy briefs, reports, and articles focusing on the intricacies of energy and trade, particularly as they relate to China’s expanding influence. She collaborates with international research organisations, lending expertise on climate, development, and energy policy at the intersection with China’s global initiatives and is frequently called upon to engage with government bodies and media, providing analysis on issues that span global energy transitions influenced by China’s policies, with features in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The Diplomat, among other notable publications.
Dr Jorg Wiegratz
Jorg works on the political economy and moral economy of neoliberalism in Africa and elsewhere, with a particular focus on the topics of neoliberal moral restructuring/change, economic fraud & anti-fraud measures, commercialisation and economic pressure. He is on the editorial board of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), and coordinator of the roape.net blog series on Capitalism in Africa and Economic trickery, fraud and crime in Africa and was ROAPE editor for Briefings & Debates (2018-2021) and deputy editor of roape.net (2019-2021). He was part of the editorial team of the project ‘Capitalism in my City’ and currently coedits a blog series on Pressure in the City.
Before joining POLIS in in August 2012 Jorg taught at the Universities of Bath and Sheffield. From 2004 to 2007, Jorg worked as a researcher and consultant in Uganda, for the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the Government of Uganda’s Ministry of Trade, Tourism and Industry and the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GIZ). Jorg has been a Resource Person at Makerere University and a Visiting Scholar at the Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC), Kampala. From the mid-1990s onwards, he worked as a journalist for German Press Agency, North German Broadcasting, and Schweriner Volkszeitung.
Jorg researches neoliberalism as a political-economic and cultural phenomenon. This work to-date has explored aspects of neoliberalism especially neoliberal moral economy/moral restructuring, economic fraud/trickery, anti-fraud measures, and commercialisation (e.g. of football). This focus on matters of cultural political economy, everyday IPE, capitalism in Africa, and the political economy of global and local development is informed by empirical work in Uganda and Kenya. More specifically, Jorg examines how processes related to the emergence and consolidation of neoliberal market societies related to the moral climate and respective changes in economy and society, and the related politics of moral order in capitalism. Aspects of political economy and moral economy are intertwined and interact and thus constitute political moral economies which Jorg has investigated in the changing moral economies of earning a living in Uganda.
Dr Thomas Da Costa Vieira
Dr Thomas Da Costa Vieira is a Lecturer in Global Political Economy at the University of Leeds, specialising in the political economy of neoliberalism, legitimation, the capitalist state, British and French political economy, and climate change. He combines critical global political economy approaches with qualitative archival research and documentary analysis.
His work examines how capitalist and neoliberal modes of governance become normalised, and how states shape economic behaviour and public consciousness through processes of legitimation, depoliticisation, and ideological framing. His work is now increasingly focusing on the study of oligarchy and corporate power in the current era of authoritarian politics.
He is also engaged in innovative pedagogy, focusing on modern, research‑led approaches to teaching global political economy. He is currently developing a pedagogical project developing cutting-edge forms of political economy teaching, using a wide range of methods and mediums, from student’s lived experiences to secondary data on firms and the world economy.
Before joining Leeds, Da Costa Vieira held positions at the London School of Economics, SOAS, and the University of Birmingham, contributing to modules on political economy, climate politics, and development.'