Matthew Benson-Strohmayer

I am an economic historian and political economist of war and peace. My research examines how states are built and unbuilt through fiscal systems: taxation, debt, oil, aid, illicit finance, and the coercive extraction of labour, grain, cattle and cash. I am a Research Fellow and Sudans Research Director in the Conflict and Civicness Research Group at the London School of Economics, and Affiliate Faculty in LSE’s Department of Economic History.

Africa, particularly Sudan and South Sudan, is my empirical foundation and the analytical centre from which I develop wider arguments about the global economic history and political economy of conflict, governance, intervention and state formation. I work from the premise that the Global South is not an exception to be explained, but a vantage point from which the architecture of the contemporary world economy can be most clearly seen. My work asks how coercive revenue orders make and unmake states across colonial, rebel, authoritarian and internationally mediated political orders.

My research develops concepts such as predatory peace - the reorganisation, rather than resolution, of coercive revenue orders through peace settlements - and civic fiscal resistance, which describes how civic actors contest or redirect extractive governance. My first book, Of Rule Not Revenue: Predation, State-Unbuilding, and Conflict in Sudan and South Sudan, 1821-2023, for Cambridge University Press’s African Studies Series, draws on more than 700 interviews and archival research conducted between 2014 and 2024.

My articles have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding. I am also developing an invited Cambridge University Press Elements book, A History of the Economic History of the State, and a comparative book project on how coercive revenue orders make and unmake states.