Decolonising Economics with Ingrid Kvangraven

Ingrid Kvangraven, a Lecturer in International Development at King’s College London, joined TWQ as an Academic Editor in 2022. Her research is broadly concerned with the role of finance in development, debates about uneven development, dependency and imperialism, and critically assessing the economics field itself from an anti-colonial perspective. She is the founder and editor of the blog, Developing Economics, and co-founder and Steering Group Member of Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ). Read our Q&A with Ingrid about what first interested her in the field of academia, the projects she is currently working on, and her hopes for the future. 

1. Can you tell me a bit about yourself and where you grew up?

I was born in Norway and spent the first two years of my life in a small village in the countryside. My mum worked as a teacher while my dad worked in the City Hall. When I was two years old my dad got a job with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad)and we moved to Botswana. We later moved to Cambodia and Mozambique, with periods in the little village in Norway in-between, as my dad took on new jobs. I would say that my childhood shaped my understanding of the world, as at a young age I was exposed to extreme global inequalities.

2. How did you get involved in academia?

I was not sure about what I wanted to do when I was in high school, but I knew I wanted to work towards tackling the problem of global inequality. I went into Development Studies as an undergrad wanting to understand why the world is so uneven. During my studies I got heavily involved in the activist organisation Debt Justice Norway. I started volunteering for them and then interning. The organisation looks at the problems of illegitimate debt, unsustainable debt, and the role of the IMF and the World Bank in perpetuating an unequal global system. During my undergrad degree, I took courses in economics as well, but I found the way economics was approached quite limiting, as the courses did not address the structural and political nature of the global economic disparities I was interested in.

I eventually went on to do a Master’s in Development Studies at the LSE, UK, and it was there that I was exposed systematically to what I later came to know as ‘heterodox economics’. I realised that there is a whole other side of economics that I was not exposed to during my undergraduate degree, including Marxist and Keynesian theory and critique. During my year at LSE, I also learnt about The New School – a university in New York that offers advanced degrees in heterodox economics.

After my year at LSE, I got a job with Debt Justice Norway. However, when meeting with IMF and World Bank officials, I often felt my critiques were dismissed because I was not an economist

in the mainstream sense. I found the policy work important, but eventually it started to feel narrow. and I found that I wanted to have a deeper understanding of the global economic system itself. This is when I went to the New School for an MA and PhD in Economics, excited about all the deep and intensely political academic debates about economics that I would be exposed to.

3. What was it like studying at The New School in New York?

Amazing. The courses were very intellectually stimulating. I met peers who were very interesting and supportive and I learned a lot from the faculty members and the intellectual community at The New School more broadly. However, I was also exposed to the structural problems prevalent in academia, such as Eurocentrism, sexism and racism. Uncovering these realities of academia and the rigid structures that create inequalities in academia itself was eye opening and often quite shocking.

4. Can you tell me more about your work on critically scrutinising the field of Economics and your work on decolonising economics?

As soon as I started studying the economics field more systematically and critically at The New School, I was overwhelmed by all the problems with the discipline. I found the debates within the heterodox economics community really helpful and important, but also found that they tended to stop short of criticising the Eurocentrism of the economics discipline. As I wrote my PhD on dependency theory, I delved deep into the critiques by dependency theorists of Eurocentric social theory and started thinking about how they apply to economics. Their critiques are highly relevant, as economic theory often falls in the trap of assuming capitalist development was a peaceful, rational process based on hard-work and improved technological developments within England (assuming away exploitation, imperialism, and the slave trade) and that capitalism will spread evenly across the globe in this way. There are many ways in which such Eurocentric assumptions are embedded in the way basic ideas are approached in economics, like financial inclusion, debt crises, women’s empowerment, or labour productivity. The discovery of this distortion and the effects of its dominance, coupled with the fact that many economists – both mainstream and heterodox – simply do not care much about the Global South or oppressions that stem from imperialism, made me quite angry. I quickly found other peers who were equally angry as me and we started to organize an academic network to resist some of the problems with economics – including heterodox economics. That eventually led us to establish Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ) about a year after I graduated from my PhD.

5. What is the current definition for ‘dependency theory’ and can you tell me a bit about your case for a redefinition of ‘dependency theory’?

My PhD focused on asking what dependency theory is and whether and how it is useful for understanding uneven development. I found that dependency theory encompasses many different – often conflicting – theories and therefore argued that dependency theory can be better understood as a research programme. The strengths of the programme that I identified were its historical approach, the core assumption of unevenness of capitalist development, theorising from the vantage point of the Global South, a focus on social relations of production, and the focus on the particular constraints of the periphery.

Such a redefinition can help get past some of the unhelpful stereotyping of dependency theory, particularly in the Global North, which tends to see only Andre Gunder Frank as the spokesperson for dependency theory and ignore all the rich scholarship and debates that was – and still is – taking place across Latin America and Africa. In order to counter this stereotyping, I also worked on both an edited book and a special issue that provided a platform for scholarship on dependency theory along with friends and collaborators Maria Dyveke Styve, Ushehwedu Kufakurinani and Frutuoso Santanta.

6. What else did your PhD focus on?

I also wrote about debt and finance in two different ways during my PhD. First, I was interested in what was driving the demand for African Eurobonds at the time of my PhD – which was the period of the “Africa Rising” narrative. With my co-author Aleksandr Gevorkyan, I found that what was driving the yields of these bonds was strongly related to factors outside of these countries’ control, such as interest rates in the US, perceptions of global financial (in)stability, and commodity prices. Our findings suggested that the sharp increase in Eurobonds issuances on the African continent was perhaps more related to global demand than ‘development’ in the countries concerned, as the mainstream narrative at the time suggested.

Second, I worked with Paulo dos Santos on electronic payment systems  and how platforms with VISA and MasterCard are being pushed by the World Bank and philanthropic organisations. We pointed to the uneven power relations and powerful financial interests driving the penetration of global banks and their services into the global South. While these developments were often pursued under the innocent guise of ‘financial inclusion’, we showed that ideas about financial inclusion were themselves based on distorted assumptions about how capitalist economic development evolves and how individuals manage to get out of poverty.

Since then, I have continued work along these lines, including on African financial systems and financialization (with Kai Koddenbrock and Ndongo Samba Sylla), international financial subordination (with Ilias Alami, Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi, Annina Kaltenbrunner, Kai Kodddenbrock, Ingrid Kvangraven, Jeff Powell), and the hierarchies of global finance (with Maria Dyveke Styve).

7. Can you tell me about your role in the Department of International Development at Kings?

I have been at Kings for two years. The Department of International Development at Kings is only 10 years old and is an exciting young department.

This academic year I will be teaching a module titled Decolonising Economics. The module is based on the book I mentioned that I am writing with co-authors and I will be teaching it with one of my co-authors who is also my colleague and friend, Devika Dutt. The module explores the way that the discipline of economics is based on and reproduces colonial narratives, theories, concepts, and methods. It goes through the colonial history of the economics field and goes in depth into the debates about how mainstream economic concepts may be related to colonialism, Eurocentrism, and imperialism. It also explores alternative, anti-colonial strands of economics, and unpacks how they are relevant for understanding issues of economic development today, as well as how they challenge and contrast to Eurocentric theorisation. It also gives the students the opportunity to apply different economic theories to concrete questions in development in order to critically evaluate how economic analyses may be Eurocentric and the real-world implications this may have. 

8. Can you tell me about the blog you founded called Developing Economics?

I founded the blog during my PhD. It was a time when I had started blogging a lot about critiques of mainstream economics and ideas about heterodox economics and I noticed that my blog posts often went completely viral. I believe the reason for this was that there was a gap in the blogosphere at the time – that there were not enough blog publications coming out that were connecting theoretical debates in economics to real-world issues. A couple of the blog posts that went viral were How to Justify Teaching the Worst of Economics to Non-Economists and Why Isn’t The World Bank’s Choice of Chief Economist More Controversial? I therefore decided to create a platform specifically dedicated to scrutinizing the economics discipline and connecting these debates to current issues and debates. Since I was mostly concerned with development economics, I found the pun Developing Economics to be appropriate. From what I hear, a lot of academics use these posts in their teaching, as they often make complex material more accessible. During the heights of Covid, the amount of hits on the blog went through the roof, as there was a lot of demand for blog posts that tried to academically analyse the catastrophe we saw unfolding.

9. What books, or other media, published in the last 10 years have made an impact on you and/or the discipline?

During my PhD, the edited volume Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development by Erik Reinert, Jayati Ghosh and Rainer Kattel was incredibly helpful and had a big impact on me. It helped to show students and scholars everywhere the richness of the debates about economic development that are most often ignored in the economics discipline. I have also been very inspired by communities of scholars across the world that are coming together to do and share pathbreaking work, such as the conversations that are happening about monetary sovereignty and those who are looking at dependency theories through a new lens, (e.g. The African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty conferences and the Association for Heterodox Economics). Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ) has also been a very nurturing and inspiring space for me that I have learned a lot from.

10. Who have been your strongest influencers /key mentors that have helped steer your academic journey or given you guidance in life?  

To be honest, I have always received the most helpful steer and support from my peers, rather than senior ‘mentors’. As a PhD student I was heavily involved in student politics and also started a working group on Economic Development within the Young Scholar’s Initiative of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), which allowed me to connect to peers across the world and find like-minded students and early career scholars. Those networks led to academic collaborations on research projects, collaborations of academic activism, as well as – and perhaps more importantly – strong and supportive friend groups.  I am not sure how I could have survived academic life without such strong and nurturing support systems of academic networks. Especially in the face of oppressive academic hierarchies, such horizontal and supportive peer networks are incredibly important.

11. If you did not become an academic, what field do you think you would have worked in?

I would probably be in the policy-advocacy world, or in journalism, as I enjoy undertaking in-depth research and making it accessible for a wider audience. I actually applied for journalism school at the same time that I applied for a PhD, as I was still considering that alternative trajectory. I’m quite happy that I manage to also work on advocacy and academic activism, accessible writing, and editorial work, alongside my academic role.

12. What has been the biggest challenge for you in your academic career so far?

In the beginning of my PhD I did not have much confidence in my own academic work. During that period I was very unsure about whether my ideas were interesting, valid, or worthy of academic publishing, especially given that I was working with theoretical frameworks that were quite severely marginalised both in mainstream and heterodox economics. I found that the focus on our individual ‘contribution’ in academia can be quite stressful and anxiety-inducing for students and early career scholars and there is often not a strong enough support system for such students and scholars. This is connected to how academia can be a very individualistic sector, which for me was perhaps particularly difficult as  I am naturally more of a community-oriented person. I am now glad that I somehow found a way to have a strong community within academia despite the sector’s notorious focus on the individual. With time and support, I am also now relieved to say I don’t feel that insecure about my work anymore, although there are always moments when doubts resurface. Now that I am transitioning out of the early-career stage of my career I would say that the key challenge is more related to trying to build stronger institutions to support radical and critical thinking and academic activism, as academic institutions are constantly under threat and can be structurally quite violent towards early career scholars who tend to be on precarious contracts. The ongoing labour disputes in academia in the UK – that started even before I arrived in the UK in 2018 – have been important resistance to the worsening of the field in terms of pay, workload, precarity, inequalities and pensions. However, the problems in the sector have continued to grow and we need a much more strategic and disruptive approach from the union if we are to shift the labour trends of the sector. The situation at the moment is so bad that is has contributed to an explosion of mental health problems among academics. As I wrote with my friend and collaborator Surbhi Kesar last year, the task of decolonising economics cannot take place in institutions that are increasingly shaped by market forces. Again, the like-minded peers and comrades who meet regularly on the picket line to resist the system are the beacon of hope in the sector.

13. What has been your biggest achievement or proudest career moment? 

Publishing the first paper from my PhD on dependency theory was a major milestone that gave me both relief and confidence. That paper was a huge intellectual exercise that took me a long time to work through and figure out how to express. The article only came out two years after I had graduated with my PhD – so it was literally five years of hard work, sweat, and anxiety from the inception of the idea to the publication of the article.

However, I would like to point to another proud achievement as well, which is perhaps not a ‘moment’ but a process. I am proud of the networks and collaborative spaces that I have been able to contribute to building, such as creating Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ), contributing to the revival of the Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE), and the facilitation of more informal social spaces for academics to meet and support each other. These are of course ongoing processes and the task of making academia more supportive and collaborative is far from done.

14. What advice would you give to early career researchers?

If someone is considering doing a PhD, they should know that academia is a tough sector that is only worth going into if you have a real passion for your work and ideas. You will spend a lot of time alone with your books, articles, and drafts, and this will feel incredibly difficult if you are not passionate about your research. The other advice I have, which helped me, is to build a collaborative space around you to counter the isolating experience that many PhDs and early career projects can be. Remember that your peers likely also feel isolated – it is worth reaching out to them to try to build something together – be it a reading group, seminar series, weekly pub-meetings, or a loose network.

These communities can help you both mentally and in your career. Creating such spaces will also help the community beyond the benefits you yourself accrue.

15. What do you hope to achieve in the future?

I hope to be able to continue being involved in the exciting research agendas on decolonising economics, dependency theory, and anti-colonial perspectives on development finance, and to also help to nurture the work of future generations who want to pursue projects within these themes. I would hope this could contribute to both better understandings of the world and to challenge the dominance of Eurocentric features of economics and development studies. As such, I would hope the work could shift the nature of these disciplines and open up space for radical political economy to be taken seriously. I do believe Third World Quarterly can play a role in facilitating this process.

I also hope to continue to contribute to nurturing and strengthening the resistance to neo-liberal academia, to create better working conditions in which this critical scholarship can take place, and to ultimately work towards an academic sector that can contribute to radical politics rather than being reduced to vessels for the status quo.