Development Research
Welcome to the Development Research group at the Department of Government!
The Uppsala Politics of Development research group at the Department of Government shares an interest in understanding political, economic and social development from a global perspective. Development research raises questions about international development goals and their relationship to theory and research, democracy promotion, sustainable development, human rights, poverty and gender equality.
Development research at Uppsala University is inspired by the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, but at the same time has a clear political science profile, with a focus on political development and the politics of development. Researchers in the group study diverse topics such as peacebuilding, statebuilding, violence, postcolonial and gender dynamics in development, democratic development, political mobilization and crisis management in a variety of geographical and political contexts.
Since 2024, the department also hosts the SweDev (Swedish Development Research network) secretariat
Development Studies at UU
Development studies at bachelor or master level
PhD Programme
Would you like to apply to the PhD Programme in Political Science?
Seminars
The development research group holds a half day workshop once per semester. We also host brown bag lunch seminars for visiting presenters.
Would you like to attend or present at one of our seminars? Send an email to: developmentstudies@statsvet.uu.se
SweDev Secretariat to Uppsala
In 2024, the SweDev secretariat was moved to the Department of Government in Uppsala
Affiliated researchers
Sara Alemir
PhD Candidate. Sara's research focuses on gender, border security and US-Mexico relations.
Li Bennich Björkman
Professor. Li has worked on regime change, democratization, corruption and dictatorship and trajectories of cultural continutity with empirical focus on Eastern Europe, Asia, the Baltic States and Central Europe. She has also studied diasporas and living in exile.
Elin Bjarnegård
Professor. Elin's research interests include comparative politics with a particular focus on gender; the impact of parties, electoral laws and networks on political recruitment; the role of informal institutions in politics; men and masculinities; gender politics; and attitudes towards and dynamics of violence in conflict. She teaches mainly in the field of development studies.
Amal Bourhrous
PhD Candidate. Amal's dissertation work focuses on emotions in political theory. She has previously worked on the dynamics of identity, citizenship and nation-building as they relate to statehood and sovereignty; securitization trends and the interacton of religion and politics in the Middle East/North Africa region.
Dolores Calvo
Researcher. She is currently working on a project on implementation of policies against sexual corruption in Tanzania, dealing with questions of abuse of power, sexual abuse, gender norms, coercion and consent. She is part of the steering group of the Uppsala University Research Environment on Sexual Corruption. She also works as consultant in different projects related to gender, development and gender-based violence.
Karin Carlsson
PhD Candidate. Her dissertation focuses on civil society strategies to navigate resistance to gender equality and LGBTQ rights. She has a background as a development practitioner, mainly working on gender mainstreaming, gender based violence and the WPS agenda in contexts like Nicaragua, Colombia and the DRC.
Qinya Feng
PhD Candidate. Her dissertation research combines political psychology and social science genetics to explore the development of political attitudes, behaviour, and psychological traits that are related to social diversity and intergroup relations
Åsa Eldén
Researcher. Åsa works in the project "Sexual abuse of power: Taking action against sextortion in Tanzania". She holds a PhD in sociology and is also an independent consultant and researcher collaborating with agencies and civil society organisations.
Emma Elfversson
Associate senior lecturer/Assistant Professor. Emma works on issues spanning development studies, comparative politics and peace research. Her current research investigates postwar urban violence, community policing in urban and rural areas, land rights and climate resilience strategies, and the social networks of urban mediators
Michal Grahn
Associate senior lecturer/Assistant Professor. His research focuses on political representation, behavior, gender, and sexuality politics. His current projects revolve around diversity initiatives in Swedish party politics, LGBTQ+ rights and political participation, and segregation of sexual minorities in Sweden.
Find out more about Michal Grahn
Ivan Gusic
Associate senior lecturer/Assistant Professor. Ivan's research focuses on peacebuilding, war-to-peace transitions, ethnonational conflict, urban violence, urban peace, urban war and postwar cities (Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Kirkuk, Mitrovica, Mostar, Nicosia, etc.) in contexts like the post-Yugoslav spaces, Northern Ireland, the Middle East
Malin Holm
Researcher. Studies social media, gender and political communication. In particular, she has investigated how platform affordances shape power dynamics in online political conversations through case studies in a wide variety of contexts, such as the US, Scandinavia and the Middle East.
Sandra Håkansson
Researcher. Sandra's research mainly focuses on gender and politics, political violence, political representation, candidate recruitment, and gender-based violence. It encompasses research on Sweden, Sri Lanka, Colombia, The US, and the Middle East.
Anna Jarstad
Professor. Anna leads a project on Relational Peace which seeks to define, characterize and analyze different varieties of peace that evolve after civil war. She has done research on power sharing – when former combatants form joint governments – and the nexus of democratization and peacebuilding in war-torn societies.
Anna Jeglinska
PhD Candidate. Her dissertation project focuses on Polish diaspora policy, identity politics, and the role of education.
Cecilia Josefsson
Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor. Her research focuses on political institutions and representation with a focus on gender. She has conducted field research in Uganda and Uruguay. Currently, she is researching gendered working conditions and leadership in the Swedish Parliament and gender and political representation in sub-Saharan Africa during COVID-19
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Bahre Kiros
Postdoctoral researcher. His research broadly focuses on the intersection of environment and development economics using panel data and spatial data from Ethiopia and Uganda. He is particularly interested in examining the impacts of environmental degradation on welfare and development. His current research investigates the impact of disaster events on countries' policies for climate mitigation, adaptation, and sustainable development
Joakim Kreutz
Senior lecturer/Associate professor. His research mainly focuses on international politics and - in particular - the use and responses to political violence. He has developed datasets on conflict termination and individual mediators in armed conflicts and lethal militarized interstate disputes. He has also conducted fieldwork in conflict-affected contexts including Myanmar and Colombia.
Hannah Lundgren
PhD Candidate at the Department of Government and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research. Hannah has a background in political science, development studies, and gender studies. Her dissertation centers on how climate-related understandings and practices relate to broader issues of power and inequality.
Anna Michalski
Professor. Her research interests include: conceptualizations of soft power; formation of foreign policy interests and preferences; conditionality, policy transfer, policy convergence and ideational convergence in foreign policy; public diplomacy. Area interests include: the EU as a foreign policy actor; Europeanization of national foreign policy with a focus on the Nordic countries; EU enlargement; EU-China relations; EU's democratization policy
Daniel Nohrstedt
Professor. His research interests include the policy process, collaborative governance, policy networks, crisis management, and natural hazards
Jeffrey Paller
Researcher. Jeffrey uses ethnography, focus groups, and surveys to examine the political conditions under which democratic activity and accountability develop in urban communities, specifically in Africa.
Joakim Palme
Professor. His research has been focused on comparative analyses of modern welfare state regimes and their consequences for social inequalities. He has also addressed the relevance of social protection systems in a development context, and in the light of various aspects of population change such as migration.
Charles Parker
Professor. Charles has published extensively on climate change politics, crisis management success and failure, and whether disruptive disasters can contribute to meaningful policy action.
Camille Pellerin
Researcher. Camille's research focuses on state – society relations, democratisation, political reform, public administration and urban conflict in the Horn of Africa with a particular focus on Ethiopia. . She has completed complex risk and research training for fieldwork in (post-)conflict settings and works as an independent researcher and consultant in projects funded by international development cooperation donors.
Camilla Reutersvärd
Associate senior lecturer. Camilla's research focuses on the politics of gender policy in developing contexts. Within this area, her work centers on party politics, social movements, and religious institutions with an empirical focus on Latin America.
Sebastian Sirén
Postdoctoral researcher. Has a background in sociology. His research is oriented towards comparative welfare state analysis, and studies of the causes and consequences of social policy institutions. In his PhD project, Sebastian explored the driving forces, mechanisms and outcomes of social protection in a development context. He is currently working on a project on the distributional outcomes of changing social insurance institutions.
Anders Sjögren
Senior lecturer/Associate Professor. Anders research focuses on comparative politics and centres on how democratisation and national identity shapes and is shaped by state-society relations. Empirically, he specialises on Kenya and Uganda
Johanna Söderström
Senior lecturer/Associate Professor. Johanna's research focuses on the intersection between democratization, peacebuilding and statebuilding. She works on the political mobilization of ex-combatants, and the long-term conditions of peace, and the conceptualization of relational peace. She has conducted fieldwork in different contexts including Colombia, Liberia, Namibia and the USA, and worked with Cambodia, Ethiopia and multi-country comparisons.
Suruchi Thapar-Björkert
Professor. Suruchi's research falls in four specific areas: Gendered Discourses of Colonialism and Nationalism, Gendered Violence in India and Europe, Ethnicity, Social Capital and Social Exclusion, and Qualitative Feminist Research Methodologies.
Katrin Uba
Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor. Her research interests are protest events, social movement outcomes, labour movement and climate activism. She is currently involved in projects studying the visions of climate activism, political outcomes of environmental movement and the use of threat in collective bargaining in Sweden
Sten Widmalm
Professor. Sten's research focuses on demoratic development, conflict studies, crisis management, decentralization, and corruption. His research spans contexts such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uganda, and Europe.
Pär Zetterberg
Professor. Pär's main research interests lie in the area of comparative politics and deals, among other things, with political recruitment and political representation in a comparative perspective, usually with an emphasis on developing countries.
"Defending the Status Quo" (OUP, 2024) Cecilia Josefsson
"Citizens, Civil Society, and Activism under the EPRDF Regime in Ethiopia " (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023) Camille Pellerin & Logan Cochrane
Research projects
- The Everyday Practice of Paying Taxes in Sub-Saharan Africa
- The Continuation of Conflict-related Violence in Postwar Cities: Mapping violence at the street level
- State, Tourism, and Heritage: Kalbeliya in its pre-recognition phase in India
- Shades of Civic Activism: State – Labour Relations in India and Ethiopia
- Sexual corruption. Understanding, measuring and preventing abuse of power for sex
- Secondary mobilization: The spread of political violence within and across borders
- Mapping Women Peacemakers: Exploring the “More Women-More Peace” Nexus
- Living on contested land after war
- Higher Education on the Democracy – Autocracy Continuum – What roles do bureaucrats in higher education play for democratisation and safeguarding democracy?
- Gender Aspects on Election Violence
- Gender and Political Representation in a (Post-) Pandemic Era: How the Increased Salience of Health and Poverty Issues Affects Women's Political Inclusion and Power in Low-Income Countries
- Expanding Markets in Life: Exploring emerging ART practices in India and Uganda
- Contested Elections and Street Politics. Comparing Protest Coalitions in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Bureaucracy and Ecopolitics in Ethiopia’s Political Transition – on the Role of Environmental Bureaucrats in Democratisation