Contact details

Email: n.bernards@warwick.ac.uk

Tel.: +44(0) 24765 28445

Room: R3.19 Ramphal Building

Advice and Feedback Hours, Term 1: Mondays, 3-4:00pm (R3.19 or via MS Teams); Wednesdays 11:30-12:30pm (vis MS Teams) Please use this link to sign up for a meeting time. If you are not a student at Warwick, please email me with any queries rather than booking an appointment using this form.

Associate Professor

• Deputy Director of Graduate Studies (Taught)
• Equity Officer for the School for Cross-faculty Studies

Biography

I am a political economist with research and teaching interests in the past and present intersections of labour, finance, and global governance. My work is historically-oriented, with an emphasis on how long-run legacies of colonialism have shaped the present context of sustainable development practice.

Prior to starting at Warwick in 2017, I held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Political Studies at Queen's University, Canada, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I completed a PhD in International Relations at McMaster University in 2016.

I am currently the Equity Officer and Chair of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee for the School for Cross-Faculty Studies, and Deputy Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes in GSD.

Research

I have published on a range of issues around labour, finance, and governance including colonial histories, agrarian finance, informal economies, technological change, and international labour regulation.

My first book, The Global Governance of Precarity (Routledge, 2018), examines the governance of irregular forms of labour in sub-Saharan Africa through a historical study of the activities of the International Labour Organization. I draw together analyses of ILO policy towards forced labour, unemployment, and social protection for irregular workers in sub-Saharan Africa from 1919-present.

My most recent book, currently in press, looks at the global history of efforts to extend financial services to the poorest. The book puts recent initiatives promoting the use of new financial technologies in the context of a longer history dating back to inter-war colonialism. The book draws on this history as a way of examining the limits of neoliberal models of development, showing how efforts to resolve poverty through the construction of new markets have often exacerbated existing patterns of uneven development. A Critical History of Poverty Finance: Neoliberal Failures in a Post-Colonial World will be published with Pluto Press in 2022.

I am also director of the Africa Research Network at Warwick.

PhD Supervision

I welcome inquiries from prospective PhD students interested in topics which intersect with any of my research interests.

I'm especially keen to hear from researchers interested in: critical political economy and political ecology approaches to sustainable development issues; global labour issues; global governance; technological change; finance and sustainable development; historical approaches.

Topics I'm currently supervising or advising:

• Alternative finance for sustainable energy

Teaching

2021-22 modules

• Term 1: GD309 Debt, Money, and Global Sustainable Development
• Term 2: GD310 World of Work: Global Perspectives on Labour and Livelihoods
• Term 2: GD906 Sustainable Development Policy

Teaching Qualifications

Fellow - Higher Education Academy

Selected publications

Books

• (Forthcoming) A Critical History of Poverty Finance: Neoliberal Failures in a Post-Colonial World, Pluto Press.
• (2018) The Global Governance of Precarity: Primitive Accumulation and the Politics of Irregular Work, Routledge/RIPE Series in Global Political Economy.

Edited collections

• (2021) 'Placing surplus populations in global capitalism: fluidity, difference, governance', special issue of Geoforum, 126. [co-edited with Susanne Soederberg]
• (2019) 'The changing technological infrastructures of global finance', special issue of Review of International Political Economy, 26 (5). [co-edited with Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn]

Recent journal articles

• (In press) 'The World Bank, agricultural credit, and the rise of neoliberalism in global development', New Political Economy.
• (2021) 'Relative surplus populations and the crises of contemporary capitalism: reviving, revisiting, recasting', Geoforum 126: 412-419. [with Susanne Soederberg]
• (2021) '"Latent" surplus populations and colonial histories of drought, groundnuts, and finance in Senegal', Geoforum 126: 441-450.
• (2021) 'Child labour, cobalt and the London Metal Exchange: Fixing, fetish, and the limits of financialization', Economy and Society 50 (4): 542-564.
• (2021) 'Poverty finance and the durable contradictions of colonial capitalism: Placing 'financial inclusion' in the long run in Ghana', Geoforum 123: 89-98.
• (2020) ‘Centring labour in financialization’, Globalizations 17 (4): 714-729.
• (2019) 'Tracing mutations in neoliberal development governance: "Fintech", failure, and the politics of marketization', Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51 (7): 1442-1459.
• (2019) 'Understanding technological change in global finance through infrastructures', Review of International Political Economy 26 (5): 773-789. [with Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn]
• (2019) 'The poverty of fintech? Psychometrics, credit infrastructures, and the limits of financialization', Review of International Political Economy 26 (5): 815-838.

* For a complete list of publications, see here.

Recent blogs and commentary

• Global capitalism and the scramble for cobalt - Review of African Political Economy
• Relative surplus populations and the crises of global capitalism - Progress in Political Economy (w/ Susanne Soederberg)
• Climate Change: Why government 'inaction' isn't the problem - The Conversation
• Neoliberalism and global development before and after the Washington Consensus: Agricultural Credit at the World Bank - Developing Economics
• The Covid-19 crisis should force a rethink of 'financial inclusion' in global development - Global Policy