Dr Matthew Sterling Benson-Strohmayer is an economic historian and political economist of war and peace. His research examines how states are built—and unbuilt—through revenue systems that finance conflict, sustain elites, and shape civic resistance and state formation. Africa is his empirical foundation and the vantage point from which the global financial history of war and peace becomes legible. His work demonstrates that the Sudans are not peripheral cases, but central sites for understanding how fiscal power, conflict, and negotiated civic resistance structure political orders globally. He is Research Fellow and Sudans Research Director in the Conflict & Civicness Research Group (CCRG), and affiliate faculty in the Department of Economic History at LSE.
Benson-Strohmayer’s work develops concepts such as civic fiscal resistance, fiscal fragmentation, and predatory peace to analyse how revenue and rule intersect across time and place. He uses the term predatory peace to describe peace settlements that reorganise, rather than dismantle, coercive fiscal systems, securing political order through the reconfiguration of extractive infrastructures.
His first book, Of Rule Not Revenue: Predation, State-Unbuilding, and Conflict in Sudan and South Sudan, 1821-2023, has been formally invited for peer review by Cambridge University Press (African Studies Series) following endorsement by the editorial board in May 2025. Drawing on over 700 interviews and extensive archival research across Sudanese, South Sudanese, colonial, and rebel-held collections, the book investigates how fiscal systems underpin enduring patterns in the structures of rule, peacemaking, and war-making.
Benson-Strohmayer’s work has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, among other outlets. He is co-editing a forthcoming Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding special issue on global fragmentation and leads research on the ethics and methodologies of working with in-country civic networks in conflict-affected settings.
His academic research builds on two decades of professional experience bridging policy, operations, and field research. He has held posts in Sudan with Médecins Sans Frontières and in South Sudan with Crown Agents, and worked with the World Bank, Rift Valley Institute, Overseas Development Institute, Institute of Development Studies, UNHCR, and Oxfam America.
At LSE, Benson-Strohmayer teaches EH413: African Economic Development in Historical Perspective, and has previously taught African Economic History, African Political Economy, and development governance courses at Durham University, LSE, and the University of Sussex. He holds a PhD and MA in History from Durham (ESRC-funded), an MA in Governance and Development from IDS, and a BA in International Relations from Tufts University.
He regularly contributes to media outlets including the BBC and Al Jazeera. Dr Benson-Strohmayer’s academic website, including a full list of publications, is available here.