FIELD OF RESEARCH/RESEARCH INTERESTS

International Relations, African political economy, China-Africa relations, infrastructure, sovereign debt, spatial political economy, regionalism, critical realism.

TEACHING SPECIALISATION

Global Political Economy, Africa’s International Relations.

BIOGRAPHY

Tim Zajontz is a Research Fellow in our department’s Centre for International and Comparative Politics. He has taught courses on International Relations, Global Political Economy, the political economy of the Global South and Africa’s international relations at Stellenbosch, St Andrews and Freiburg. He also worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh in the project African Governance and Space (AFRIGOS).

Tim is one of the coordinators of the Collaborative Research Group ‘African Politics and International Relations’ of the Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (AEGIS). He earned a PhD from the School of International Relations at St Andrews where he worked under the supervision of the late Professor Ian Taylor on the political economy and governance of Chinese-financed infrastructure projects in Africa. Tim holds an M.A. in International Studies from Stellenbosch and a B.A. in Political Science and Public Law from the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Tim’s research centres around Africa’s international relations and political economy, with a particular focus on Southern and East Africa as well as on Africa’s relations with China and the European Union (EU). His current research interests include the political economy and politics of infrastructure, especially in the context of global connectivity initiatives such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the EU’s Global Gateway. He is also interested in dynamics of indebtedness and dependency, conceptual questions related to structure-agency dialectics, economic imperialisms, late neoliberalism and the production of space in international relations. Previously, he has researched African regionalisms and civil society regionalisation in southern Africa. Before joining academia, Tim has worked in various advisory positions in German and EU politics. He is co-founder of the Germany-based not-for-profit organisation Freundeskreis Uganda e.V.

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS