The Steering Committee of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) is pleased to announce that the 2017 URPE Dissertation Fellow is Ilias Alami, Ph.D. candidate, Politics, The University of Manchester, UK. Mr. Alami is awarded this Fellowship and $5,000 (USD) in support of his dissertation “Post-crisis capital account policies in emerging capitalisms: regaining policy space? A comparison between Brazil and South Africa.” His dissertation is being supervised by Dr. Stuart Shields (Manchester), and Dr. Adrienne Roberts (Manchester).

Mr. Alami’s dissertation provides a Marxist political economy analysis of capital-account policies used in Brazil and South Africa since the beginning of the recent global financial crisis, with particular attention to the specificity of capital accumulation and class configurations prevailing in these countries. He argues that understanding the uneven and conflict-ridden processes of policy-making is crucially important for developing progressive and sustainable forms of financial governance in emerging countries. Mr. Alami’s research makes contributions to the literatures on financialization, the political economy of financial statecraft and regulation, Marxian theories of the state and money, and the debates about more progressive forms of financial governance in emerging countries.

The URPE Steering Committee is pleased to award the 2017 URPE Dissertation Fellowship to Ilias Alami. We also continue to be encouraged by the significant response the fellowship receives from doctoral students. We received many excellent dissertation proposals and regret that we lack the resources to support additional students. We remain committed to our fundraising efforts in order to increase our support for doctoral students working in radical political economics. There is significant unmet need, and we hope that members and supporters of URPE will generously assist us in meeting it.

In Solidarity,

URPE Steering Committee