Kai Koddenbrock is a professor of political economy at Bard College Berlin. He is working on economic sovereignty and self-determination in the Global South and particularly on the role of the international monetary system and global and domestic financial markets in helping and constraining this quest. Located at the intersections of international relations and international political economy, he also works on geopolitics and geoeconomics and the new scramble for rare earths.

He co-founded with Ndongo Sylla and Maha ben Gadha the African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty conferences, which have been held in Tunis and Dakar in 2019 and 2022. He has led the Politics of Money Network with Benjamin Braun, funded by the German Research Council, and heads a research group at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth.

Kai has held academic positions at several German universities, worked for the United Nations in NYC, the World Food Programme in Rome and the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. He has been a fellow at Columbia University, the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies, Sciences Po, University of Sussex, as well as the Institute for Advanced Studies and the École des Hautes Études Internationales in Paris.

He has contributed essays to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and to Jacobin and Soziopolis among others. His most recent academic articles are: "Earnest Struggles: Structural Transformation, government finance and the recurrence of debt crisis in Senegal,"Beyond financialisation: the longue durée of finance and production in the Global South" and "International financial subordination: a critical research agenda." He has recently edited Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance (Routledge), with Benjamin Braun, and African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty in the 21st Century (Pluto Press), with Maha ben Gadha, Ndongo Samba Sylla, Fadhel Kaboub and Ines Mahmood. His latest monograph was The practice of humanitarian intervention: Aid workers, agencies and institutions in the DR Congo (Routledge, 2015).

Kai tweets @kaikodden and his publications can be accessed through Google Scholar and on this PDF.

 

• Postcolonial Political Economy
• Economic self-determination and sovereignty
• Geoeconomics
• Money and financial markets
• Social theory

Most recent Publications:

Books:

Koddenbrock, K (2015): The practice of humanitarian intervention: Aid workers, agencies and institutions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Routledge, (Paperback 2018).

Edited Volumes:

Braun, B. and Koddenbrock, K. (2022): Capital claims: Power and Global Finance, Review of International Political Economy Series, Routledge.

ben Gadha, M., Kaboub, F., Koddenbrock, K., Mahmood, I., and Sylla, N. (2021): African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty in the 21^st Century, Pluto Books.

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

Koddenbrock, K (2024) Earnest Struggles: Structural Transformation, Government Finance and the Recurrence of Debt Crisis in Senegal, Review of International Political Economy, 31(6),1788-1813

Alami, I., Alves, C., Bonizzi, B., Kaltenbrunner, A., Koddenbrock, K., Kvangraven, I., and Powell, J. (2022): International Financial Subordination – A critical research agenda, Review of International Political Economy.

Koddenbrock, K., Kvangraven, I., and Sylla, N. (2022): Beyond financialization: The longue durée of finance and Prodcuton in the Global South, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 46(4), 703-733.

Petry, J., Koddenbock, K., and Nölke, A. (2021): Financialization under state capitalism: Securities exchanges in emerging markets, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, online first.

Koddenbrock, K., Kvangraven, I., and Sylla, N. (2020): Financial subordination and uneven financialization in 21st century Africa, Community Development Journal, 56(1), 119-140.

Book Chapters:

Koddenbrock, K. and Mertens, D.: Geoeconomics and national production regimes. On German exportism and the integration of economic and security policy, in: Babic, M,. Dixon, A., and Liu, I. (eds.) (2022): The Political Economy of Geoeconomics: Europe in a Changing World. Palgrave.

Koddenbrock, K: Von der Relevanz der deutschen Internationalen Beziehungen zum Nutzen der politischen Ökonomie als Konfliktanalyse, in: Schöne, H and Bergem, W (eds.) (2022): Wie relevant ist die Politikwissenschaft?, Springer VS.