Faculty

Dr. Kuat B. Akizhanov is an Associate Professor at the Higher School of Economics, KazGUU University (Kazakhstan) where he has founded The Political Economy Research Centre. In 2019-2021, he was a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences of the University of Bath (UK) where he studied at the PhD Research Programme in Global Political Economy: Transformations and Policy Analysis (2015-2019). During 2019-2020, Dr. Akizhanov was a Teaching Fellow in Public Policy and Management in International Development Department, School of Government, University of Birmingham (UK).

Kuat joined academia in 2015 after serving for 15 years in different governmental agencies including ministries of justice, finance, the Kazakh President’s office and as a head of a state insurance company. While at the University of Bath, Kuat worked as a Teaching Assistant and was qualified as an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK). Currently, he is also a CERGE-EI Foundation Teaching Fellow.

Qualifications
PhD in Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, 2019
MA in Public Policy and Management, University of Manchester, 2004
LLM, University of Virginia School of Law, 1999
LL.B (Hons) in International Law, Kazakh National Pedagogical University, 1998

Research Interests
His academic and research interests include financialisation, finance capitalism and neoliberalism; the political economy of socio-economic inequality; international development; critical realism; Eurasian region.

Recent Publications

Kuat Akizhanov (2022): Rentier capitalism and its discontents. Crime and Punishment in a Neoliberalised Era, Eurasian Geography and Economics, DOI: 10.1080/15387216.2022.2029522

Kuat Akizhanov (2023): Finance Capitalism and Income Inequality in the Contemporary Global Economy. A Comparative Study of the USA, South Korea, Argentina and Sweden. Palgrave Macmillan, UK. ISBN: 978-3-031-21767-8

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