Description:

Nitsan Chorev is the Harmon Family Professor of Sociology and International Studies at Brown University. She will be giving a talk entitled "Foreign aid in comparative-historical perspective: The case of local pharmaceutical production in East Africa."

Professor Chorev was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a Global Fellow at the UCLA International Institute. She specializes in the politics of globalization and neoliberalism, and teaches global political economy, comparative historical sociology, classical social theory, and contemporary social theory.

She is currently working on a new book project, on local pharmaceutical production in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. This project aims to identify the conditions that allowed a pharmaceutical sector to emerge in East Africa in the 1980s/1990s and the conditions that made some local firms improve their quality standards in the 2000s. The project also compares this experience to the more successful cases of India, where many of the drugs in East Africa come from, and China. One of the main insights stemming out from the case of pharmaceutical production is that pockets of industrialization are possible in spite of local difficulties because of particular – and often quite controversial - types of transnational links.

For more details and for a copy of the workshop paper prior to the talk, please contact the CHSS student coordinators.