Dr Alastair Fraser

Alastair Fraser was born in South Africa but has lived mostly in London. Before becoming an academic he worked for a range of international development organisations including Action for Southern Africa, the successor organisation to the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the UK. 

Alastair completed his undergraduate education at the University of Edinburgh, and a Masters at SOAS, before completing his PhD at the University of Oxford in 2010. He then held the Philomathia Fellowship at Trinity Hall, the University of Cambridge from 2010 to 2015, when he moved to SOAS.

Alastair’s research and teaching interests are at the intersections of international relations, the international political economy of development and comparative political sociology, including intervention and imperialism, aid, trade, debt and investment, trade unions, social movements, media, civil society organisations and political parties. He has supervised five completed PhDs, examined six, and is currently supervising three more.

Alastair’s published work looks both at how Western aid donors, international NGOs and multinational corporations promote their preferred economic and social agendas in Africa, and how African political elites and ordinary citizens respond to these influences.

He returns repeatedly to Zambia as his main research case study and has written about: the effects of decentralisation reforms on political contestation in local settings; populist modes of party mobilization; the politics of call-in radio programmes; the political economy of copper mining; African state negotiations with Western aid donors; state and popular responses to the influence of Chinese investment and diplomacy; and the ideological and personal effects of civil society's dependence on foreign funding. 

In the Politics Department at SOAS Alastair has served, amongst other roles, as Director of Doctoral Research, Director of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning, and Convener of the Masters Degree in African Politics. He is an elected member of the University’s Senate, the senior academic committee at SOAS, which advises the Board of Trustees on all proposals relating to the academic scope, academic structure and academic standards of the school. He is also a member of the Centre for African Studies (https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/institutes-and-regional-centres/centre-african-studies)

Outside SOAS, Alastair has served as the external examiner for Oxford University’s Masters in African Studies. He is on the Editorial Working Group of the Review of African Political Economy (www.roape.net), a radical Africanist journal and one of the first major social science journals to break away from corporate control of academic publishing - becoming fully open access in 2023: the journal charges no fees to those either publishing in it or reading it. He is a Fellow of the Southern African Institute of Policy and Research (www.saipar.org), based in Lusaka, Zambia. 

Book time with Alastair Fraser: A Fraser Meeting  

• Southern Africa
• International Political Economy of Development
• Extractive Industries and Society
• Party Politics
• Social movements 
• Media 
• Populism