Dr. Tim Zajontz

Profile

Tim Zajontz is Lecturer in International Relations and Global Political Economy at the professorial chair of Prof. Dr. Sandra Destradi. He has previously worked in the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh and has taught courses at the universities of St Andrews, Dresden and Stellenbosch. He earned a PhD from the School of International Relations at St Andrews where he worked under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Dr. Ian Taylor on the political economy and governance of Chinese-financed infrastructure projects across Africa. His PhD research was funded by the German Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Together with Dr. Muhidin Shangwe from the University of Dar es Salaam, Zajontz currently researches the coloniality of contemporary geopolitics in East Africa as part of a tandem project funded by Freiburg's "De/Coloniality Now" research initiative. Zajontz is Research Fellow in the Centre for International and Comparative Politics at Stellenbosch University as well as Research Associate in the Second Cold War Observatory, a global research collective which is committed to developing nuanced understandings of how great power rivalry influences and shapes societies, economies, and ecologies worldwide. He is also one of the coordinators of the Collaborative Research Group 'African Politics and International Relations' of the Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (AEGIS). He has previously worked in advisory positions in German and EU politics. He is co-founder of the Germany-based, not-for-profit organisation Freundeskreis Uganda e.V.

His research centres around Africa’s international relations and political economy, with a particular focus on Southern and Eastern Africa as well as on Africa-China and Africa-EU relations. His current research interests are infrastructure politics and the political economy of competing connectivity initiatives, especially China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment and the EU's Global Gateway. He is furthermore interested in dynamics of sovereign indebtedness and dependency and conceptual questions related to structure-agency dialectics interactions, economic imperialisms, late neoliberalism and the production of space in international relations. Zajontz has conducted research, amongst others, in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Academic CV

Research interests

• African international relations, politics and political economy
• Africa-China and Africa-EU relations
• Geopolitics, geoeconomics, Second Cold War 
• Economic governance and state-society relations
• Regionalisms, regional integration, spatial political economy
• Neo-Marxian, neo-Gramscian and decolonial approaches
• Critical realist philosophy of science

Recent publications

Books

• Zajontz, Tim, Pádraig Carmody, Mandira Bagwandeen and Anthony Leysens (eds.) 2024. Africa's Railway Renaissance: The Role and Impact of China. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Zajontz, Tim 2023. The Political Economy of China's Infrastructure Development in Africa: Capital, State Agency, Debt. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Articles

• van Wieringen, Kjeld and Tim Zajontz 2023. 'From Loan-Financed to Privatised Infrastructure? Tracing China's Turn Towards Public–Private Partnerships in Africa', Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 52(3): 434–463, https://doi.org/10.1177/18681026231188140.
• Schindler, Seth, Ilias Alami, Jessica DiCarlo, Nicholas Jepson, Steve Rolf, Mustafa Kemal Bayırbağ, Loius Cyuzuzo, Meredith DeBoom, Alireza F. Farahani, Imogen T. Liu, Hannah McNicol, Julie T. Miao, Philip Nock, Gilead Teryi, Maximiliano Facundo Vila Seoane, Kevin Ward, Tim Zajontz and Yawei Zhao 2023. ‘The Second Cold War: US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production Finance Networks’. Geopolitics, online first, https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2253432.
• Carmody, Pádraig, Zajontz, Tim and Reboredo, Ricardo 2022. ‘From “debt diplomacy” to donorship? China’s changing role in global development’, Global Political Economy 1(2): 198–217, https://doi.org/10.1332/UZHW7185.
• Zajontz, Tim 2022. ‘Seamless imaginaries, territorialized realities: the regional politics of corridor governance in Southern Africa’, Territory, Politics, Governance, online first, https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2022.2092205
• Zajontz, Tim 2022. ‘”Win-win” contested: negotiating the privatisation of Africa’s Freedom Railway with the “Chinese of today”‘, Journal of Modern African Studies 60(1): 111-134, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X21000446.
• Chiyemura, Frangton, Elisa Gambino and Tim Zajontz 2022. ‘Infrastructure and the politics of African state agency: shaping the Belt and Road Initiative in East Africa’, Chinese Political Science Review 8(1): 105-131. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-022-00214-8.
• Zajontz, Tim 2022. ‘Debt, distress, dispossession: towards a critical political economy of Africa’s financial dependency’, Review of African Political Economy 49(171): 173-183, https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2021.1950669.
• Carmody, Pádraig, Ian Taylor and Tim Zajontz 2022. ‘China’s Spatial Fix and “Debt Diplomacy” in Africa: Constraining Belt or Road to Economic Transformation?’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 56(1): 57-77, https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2020.1868014.
• Zajontz, Tim 2022. ‘The Chinese infrastructural fix in Africa: Lessons from the Sino-Zambian “road bonanza”’, Oxford Development Studies 50(1): 14-29, https://doi.org/10.1080/13600818.2020.1861230.

• Taylor, Ian and Zajontz, Tim 2020. ‘In a fix: Africa’s place in the Belt and Road Initiative and the reproduction of dependency’, South African Journal of International Affairs 27(3): 277-295, https://doi.org/10.1080/10220461.2020.1830165.

Special issue

• 2023. Co-editor (with Faye Donnelly and Gillian Brunton) for a special issue on the life and work of the late Professor Ian Taylor. Contemporary Voices: St Andrews Journal of International Relations.

Chapters in edited volumes

• Zajontz, Tim and Shangwe, Muhidin 2024. ‘Contemporary geopolitics-cum-geoeconomics in East Africa: New scrambles and omni-alignments’, in Cope, Zak (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Geopolitics. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Zajontz, Tim and Mandira Bagwandeen 2024. 'Infrastructure', in Engel, Ulf (ed.) Yearbook on the African Union. Vol. 3. Leiden: Brill.
• Zajontz, Tim 2023. ‘Infrastructure’, in Engel, Ulf (ed.) Yearbook on the African Union. Vol. 2. Leiden: Brill.
• Zajontz, Tim 2022. ‘Railway imperialisms in East Africa: Laying the tracks for exploitation’, in Cope, Zak and Ness, Immanuel (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Economic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Zajontz, Tim and Ian Taylor 2021. 'Capitalism and Africa’s (Infra)Structural Dependency: A Story of Spatial Fixes and Accumulation by Dispossession', in Oritsejafor, E.O. and Cooper, A.D. (eds.) Africa and the Global System of Capital Accumulation. Routledge.

For a comprehensive list of publications, please follow this link.

Media Work

For a list of interviews and media commentary, please follow this link.

Teaching