Biography
Anissa Bougrea examines the geopoliticisation of development aid, focusing on how private finance mobilisation, multilateral and regional development banking, and the coloniality of money intersect with EU foreign policy goals. As a Max Weber Fellow, she examines how development and security logics, from China’s rise to competition over critical raw materials, are negotiated through financialised aid, drawing on case studies including the Green Climate Fund, the European Investment Bank and the World Bank.
She holds a PhD from Ghent University, where her dissertation, ‘The Financialisation of European Union Development Aid to Africa: Promises, Practices, and Colonial Continuities’, developed a three-layered framework assessing financialisation in development policy. She held a visiting position at Yonsei University’s Institute of East and West Studies during fieldwork in Seoul in 2026, and at King’s College’s Economics Department in London in 2024.
Anissa is the recipient of the Public Banking Project Emerging Scholar Award, presented by McMaster University’s Public Banking Project with the AFD at the 2026 Development Banking Research Conference. Her work has been published in Competition & Change, the Journal of Economic Policy Reform and European Foreign Affairs Review, and in edited volumes with Routledge and Oxford University Press.
She has taught on political economy, EU-Africa relations and decolonisation, and is committed to bridging critical research with public engagement. She has provided policy analyses for the Belgian foreign affairs ministry and OACPS crisis committee.