Biography
Anissa Bougrea is a Belgian-Moroccan scholar with a PhD from Ghent University. Her dissertation examined how financial instruments, private capital mobilisation, and guarantees increasingly drive EU external action, often under the guise of ‘equal partnership,’ developing a three-layered analytical framework to highlight and assess the extent and unevenness of financialisation in EU development policy in/on Africa.
Her current research interests lie in the geopoliticisation of aid, the interplay of development and security logics, and the reconfiguration of coloniality within North-South relations through development finance. Her work has been published in the Journal of Economic Policy Reform, Competition & Change, and European Foreign Affairs Review, and in edited volumes with Routledge and Oxford University Press.
Anissa has taught extensively on political economy, EU-Africa relations, and decolonisation, and is committed to bridging critical research with public engagement. She has provided policy analyses to the Belgian foreign affairs ministry and OACPS crisis committee, and has contributed to public discourse on the genocide in Gaza and the EU’s complicity, through talks, interviews, and policy critique.
As a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow, she examines how development and security logics (from China’s rise to critical raw materials) intersect, are negotiated and operationalised through financialised aid, and reshape both development and the EU’s global role. She is deeply invested in questions of epistemic justice, academic care, and co-creating research spaces that are both politically and intellectually grounded.