Professor Christopher Cramer

Christopher Cramer is Professor of the Political Economy of Development at SOAS University of London.

Christopher Cramer has worked at the intersection of policy, poverty, and structural change for more than 30 years, since teaching economics to public officials in Maputo (Mozambique) in the early 1990s and then working with the Mass Democratic Movement in South Africa during the transition from apartheid to democracy. He has taught at SOAS since the mid-1990s, and his research has focused mainly on African political economies (especially Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Africa) but also venturing out to Latin America (Brazil and Colombia). 

In 2023, together with two SOAS colleagues, he launched Development Leadership Dialogue (DLD), an institute funded by Hyundai Motor Group and aiming to bring people and perspectives together to support silo-busting dialogue around strategic development issues. He created the pioneering MSc in Violence, Conflict, and Development (VCD) in 2000. His publications include the prize-winning Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries and the open access OUP book African Economic Development: Theory, Policy, Evidence (co-written with John Sender and Arkebe Oqubay and registering more than 150,000 downloads). 

He has been Vice Chair of the Royal African Society, Head of the Department of Development Studies, Chair of the Scientific Committee of the African Programme on Rethinking Development Economics (APORDE), a member of Norwegian Research Council boards funding development research, sat on the board of the Senate House North Block project at SOAS that delivered the Paul Webley Wing, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

• Rural labour in global supply chains
• High-value agriculture policy
• African economic development
• Extreme deprivation identification
• Political economy of war to peace transitions