Andrew Martin Fischer is Associate Professor of Social Policy and Development Studies at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS). He is also the founding editor of the book series of the UK and Ireland Development Studies Association, published by Oxford University Press, entitled Critical Frontiers of International Development Studies, and editor at the journal Development and Change. He won the 2015 International Studies in Poverty Prize, awarded by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) in 2016.
He has been involved in development studies and work in developing countries for over 30 years. This started with time spent in India and Nicaragua in the late 1980s, followed by seven years living and working with local communities in northern India and Nepal. He subsequently started his PhD at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2002, which dealt extensively with issues of poverty, inequality and social exclusion within the context of rapid economic growth in the Tibetan areas of western China. This included two years of fieldwork in the region. His work became well-known for its critical engagement with concepts of social exclusion and marginalisation, as elaborated in his first two books: State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet: Challenges of Recent Economic Growth (NIAS Press, 2005), and The Disempowered Development of Tibet in China: A study in the economics of marginalisation (Lexington Books, 2014).
More generally, he has led teaching on poverty and social policy at LSE and the ISS and has worked with and/or advised various multilateral agencies and NGOs, including UNRISD, UNW, UNDP, UNICEF, UNECOSOC, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Fischer’s current research is focused on the role of redistribution in development at local, regional and global scales and its interaction with finance and production. Since 2015, he has been leading a European Research Council Starting Grant on the political economy of externally financing social policy in developing countries, under which he completed this book.