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 sits at the intersection of development finance, geopolitics, and coloniality.
My research has taken me to the field, most recently as a visiting researcher at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, where I conducted field work at the Green Climate Fund.
I examine how aid is increasingly mobilised through private finance and aligned with security and geopolitical objectives — and how development banks, both multilateral and regional, become key institutional arenas where these logics are negotiated and operationalised. A comparative thread runs through this work: I study how emerging and middle powers like South Korea and Morocco navigate this shifting multilateral landscape through minilateral cooperation, and how domestic battles over public banking architecture (who gets a development bank, with what mandate) shape and constrain a country’s external aid capacity and geopolitical reach.
I show how financialised development initiatives, particularly in the Global South and within green transition narratives, reproduce logics of extractivism, global competition, 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 am also the recipient of the Emerging Scholar Award in Public Banking, awarded by McMaster’s Public Banking Project in collaboration with the French Development Agency (AFD), at the 2026 Development Banking Research Conference, an event included in the official programme of France’s G7 Presidency.
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 via anissa.bougrea@eui.eu or connect with me on LinkedIn.
Anissa Bougrea 