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.”
Saba Joshi's research and teaching interests lie in the intersecting fields of feminist political economy, the comparative politics of land governance, and contentious politics with a geographical focus on South and Southeast Asia. Her doctoral thesis explored “land grabbing”, or dispossession due to state-led large-scale land acquisitions for agro-industrial development, in Cambodia, through the lenses of gender, resistance and state formation. Articles from her doctoral thesis have been published in Third World Quarterly and Globalizations.
Saba holds a doctorate in Political Science/International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland (2020). She obtained her MA degree in Politics and International Studies at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (2012) and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (2009). She completed her BA in History at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi (2004). Previously, she has been a visiting scholar at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and the Centre for East and Southeast Asia at Lund University, Sweden.
During her doctoral studies, Saba was employed in DEMETER-- a six-year multidisciplinary academic research project examining gender equality, the right to food and land commercialization in Cambodia and Ghana, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and Swiss Development Corporation. Prior to that, she held professional appointments at the International Labour Office (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland and Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), Ahmedabad, India.
Saba's current research is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Early post-doc mobility grant. In her project, she will examine gendered resistance against Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in India. She is particularly interested in understanding the impacts of subnational governance on women’s contentious politics against land acquisitions and developing a comparative framework for the understanding the influence of institutional geographies of land governance on trajectories and forms of women’s political participation in movements countering large-scale land acquisitions in India. During her time at ODID, Saba will be working closely with Professor Nikita Sud.