Hi. Hello! I am Dr. Anissa Bougrea, a Belgian-Moroccan postdoctoral researcher (Max Weber fellow) at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
My research interests lie in the geopoliticisation of aid through private finance mobilisation, the interplay of development and security logics, and the coloniality within North-South relations through development finance.
I examine how development aid is increasingly aligned with security and geopolitical objectives, and how these intersect, are negotiated, and become operational through financialised aid. I further explore how emerging and middle powers, such as South Korea and Morocco, navigate the evolving multilateral context through minilateral cooperation in development finance.
I show how financialised development initiatives, especially in the Global South and within green transition narratives, reproduce logics of global competition, extractivism, and the coloniality of money. I also interrogate how the EU’s claim to act simultaneously as a “normative” and a geopolitical power becomes untenable in a context where private commercial interests and public security imperatives collide; an analytical tension that matters as much for EU and US strategists as for scholars of decoloniality.
My work has been published in Competition & Change, the Journal of Economic Policy Reform, and European Foreign Affairs Review, and in edited volumes with Routledge and Oxford University Press.
I hold a PhD from Ghent University in Belgium, with the Ghent Institute for International and European Studies. My dissertation was entitled: ‘The New European Financial Architecture for Development: Financialization of EU Aid?’, supervised by Professor Jan Orbie and Professor Mattias Vermeiren. I examined how financial instruments such as guarantees and private capital mobilisation increasingly drive European Union external action, often under the guise of ‘equal partnership,’ developing a three-layered analytical framework to highlight and assess the extent and unevenness of financialization in EU development policy in Africa.
My work attempts to challenge conventional narratives surrounding the European Union’s role as a development actor in world politics, through critical, anti-Eurocentric, and decolonial lenses, striving to amplify Global South voices and perspectives. I am deeply invested in questions of epistemic justice, academic care, and co-creating research spaces that are both politically and intellectually grounded.
I have taught and provided teaching assistance on political economy, EU-Africa relations, and decolonisation. Specifically (1) political economy: ‘International Political Economy’, ‘EU Trade Policy’, ‘Winners and Losers of Globalisation’, (2) decolonisation: ‘Community Service Learning’, and (3) development policy: ‘Thematic Specialisation in EU Politics: EU development finance’, ‘Current Affairs in International Politics: Ethics of Development Aid’, and ‘EU Global Justice.’
Contact me on anissa.bougrea@eui.eu or connect with me on LinkedIn.
Anissa Bougrea 