The department is a lively community that is recognised internationally as one of the top centres for research and teaching in development studies.

Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
After years of political turmoil, popular protests and demands for social change, one of Africa’s longest serving and powerful parties, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) dissolved in 2019. This thesis traces the disintegration of this party-state apparatus in its latter years through the analytical lens of the Addis-Djibouti Railway, a project that was part of the Ethiopian state’s larger infrastructure investment boom. Infrastructure projects of this magnitude encapsulate many facets of federal government’s ‘renaissance agenda’, the complex, negotiated and multi-scalar relationships between political and technocratic actors and the center-periphery dynamics in a country defined by the ethno-federal architecture of its bureaucracy. How do we assess and reconcile the Ethiopian state’s simultaneous cohesiveness and fragmentation?
Through elite interviews, interviews with project-affected populations, participant observation and documentary research, the thesis examines key relationships, tensions, processes and ideologies that help us understand the EPRDF’s loss of hegemonic control over the state apparatus. In doing so, the thesis grapples with the simultaneous cohesiveness and fragmentation of the Ethiopian ‘party-state’ between 2012 and 2018 and contributes more broadly to our understanding of contemporary Ethiopian politics, the state & bureaucracy in Africa, and our conceptualizations of infrastructure.