Samuel has a PhD in political economy from the University of Bristol (2019) and is currently Post-doctoral Research Associate at The Open University (UK) on the ERC-funded project Re-orienting development: The dynamics and effects of Chinese infrastructure investment in Europe (REDEFINE). Principally, his work focuses on post-socialist European capitalist development and the political economy of infrastructure projects. His research interests include Chinese capital investment, the capitalist development of illiberalism, and cultural approaches to the political economy. His has published in Contemporary Politics, East European Politics, New Political Economy, and Post-Communist Economies among others, with a forthcoming book (Routledge, 2024) focusing on the Hungarian political economy.

Samuel is a Visiting Scholar at the OEI from August 2022 and until August 2024.

REDEFINE is a 5-year, €2.5 million project funded by the European Research Council and began in November 2020. REDEFINE examines what China’s rise means for how we understand global development and, specifically, Europe’s place in it. China now sees Europe as fertile ground for new infrastructure investment, yet many European firms and governments are ill-equipped to deal with these political and economic changes. REDEFINE’s aims require a disaggregated approach to unpack project-by-project effects. Through comparative, ethnographic case studies in the UK, Germany, Greece and Hungary REDEFINE produces fine-grained analysis to understand the rationales for Chinese investment in Europe, the geopolitical dynamics surrounding these financing streams, the structuring of projects, and how they interface with national and local development policy.

Rogers, S. (2024). The Political Economy of Hungarian Authoritarian Populism: Capitalists without the Right Kind of Capital. Routledge.