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Dr. Kuat Akizhanov is a Teaching Fellow in Public Policy and Management in International Development Department, School of Government, University of Birmingham (UK) and a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath (UK). His academic and research interests include socio-economic inequality, public policy and development economics. More specifically, from the perspective of international political economy his research focuses on neoliberalism and financialisation in various countries, developmentalism, financial crises and regulation. His study is based on interdisciplinary and methodological pluralism and adopts an ontological perspective of critical realism and different heterodox economic schools as an alternative to the methods of formalistic deductivism of neoclassical economics.

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. His research agenda involves investigating economic inequality in countries of the Eurasian region. He is currently working on a book manuscript which explores how financialisation impacts income inequality. The ultimate goal is to test the financialisation-induced income inequality hypothesis (developed in his doctoral study) in relation to the five former Soviet republics (Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan). His research on the political economies of the Eurasian countries needs to be seen in the context of the “big picture” of rising socio-economic inequality having its roots in processes occurring at the global level.

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.