Caroline Hughes

Caroline Hughes is the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, Chair in Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and Associate Dean for Policy and Practice, in the Keough School of Global Affairs. She specializes in the political economy of aid and development in post-conflict and authoritarian contexts, with an emphasis on Southeast Asia. Her work challenges the liberal understanding of peace and development as public goods achieved through collaboration, and instead conceptualizes them as political relationships built to legitimize the unequal distribution of resources and subject to contestation by social groups. Hughes has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 2018.

Her books include International Intervention and Local Politics: Fragmented States and the Politics of Scale (with Shahar Hameiri and Fabio Scarpello, Cambridge University Press, 2017); The Politics of Accountability in South East Asia (with Garry Rodan, Oxford University Press, 2014); Political Economy and the Aid Industry in Asia (with Jane Hutchison, Wil Hout and Richard Robison, Palgrave, 2014); Dependent Communities: Aid and Politics in Cambodia and East Timor (Cornell South East Asia Program Publications, 2009); and The Political Economy of Cambodia’s Transition, 1991-2001 (Routledge, 2003). She edited, with Kheang Un, Cambodia’s Economic Transformation (NIAS Press, 2011).

She has written more than 30 journal articles and book chapters, and her articles have appeared in International Studies Quarterly, the Review of International Studies, Development and Change, Democratization, the Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Third World Quarterly. In 2017, she co-authored a World Bank working paper on public sector reforms and development.

She is co-authoring two forthcoming articles: “South-South Cooperation and Neoliberal Hegemony in a Post-Aid World” in Development and Change, and “Facebook, Contestation and Poor People’s Politics: Spanning the Rural-Urban Divide in Cambodia” in the Journal of Contemporary Asia.

She is an external advisor to the Cambodia Development Resource Institute in Phnom Penh and has consulted for the World Bank, the Department for International Development in the United Kingdom, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and Australian Aid.

She earned her PhD and MA from Hull University, and a BA from Oxford University.