Max Gallien

Max Gallien is a political scientist specialising in the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa, development politics, as well as informal and illegal economies. His PhD project, 'Smugglers and States - A Political Economy of Informal Trade in North Africa', is based on 14 months of in-depth fieldwork in the borderlands of Tunisia and Morocco. He holds a BA and MPhil from the University of Oxford, and has been a visiting scholar at Al-Akhawayn University Ifrane and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP).

He is a frequent commentator on the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa in journalistic outlets. He has briefed and advised government departments and embassies in the United Kingdom, Tunisia and Morocco, and is an adviser to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Tunisia in the House of Commons.

Selected publications

Journal Articles:

• Informal institutions and the regulation of smuggling in North Africa, Perspectives on Politics, Forthcoming. Open Access version: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/90957

Policy Papers, Blogs etc:

• "Understanding informal economies in North Africa", Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 16.07.2018 http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/14573.pdf
• "The Risks of Hardened Borders in North Africa", Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 16.08.2018 http://carnegieendowment.org/sada/77053
• "From smugglers to supermarkets: the 'informal economy' touches us all", The Guardian, 24.03.2017 https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/mar/24/from-smugglers-to-supermarkets-the-informal-economy-touches-us-all
• "Corruption and Reform in Tunisia: The Dangers of an Elitist Analysis", Jadaliyya, 30.05.2017 (with Mohamed Dhia Hammami) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317583140_Corruption_and_Reform_in_Tunisia_The_Dangers_of_an_Elitist_Analysis
• Clickbait and impact: how academia has been hacked. Impact of Social Sciences Blog 19 Sep 2017. (with Portia Roelofs) http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/85023/

Expertise

Political Economy, Informal Economies, Development, Smuggling, North Africa