Staff profile

Maria Eugenia obtained her PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Warwick. Prior to joining Durham, she was Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre at the University of York. 

Her research addressed the uneven outcomes of the latest commodity boom and accompanying global food crisis (2007/2008) by exploring how the rapid spread of soybean has transformed the landscape and the political economy of South American countries. She has examined how states in the region have attempted to harness the power of this profitable crop for specific political ends. Fundamentally, her research explores developing states’ capacities to govern the uneven geographies of capital that emerge during commodity booms, and critically analysed the policy frameworks that states employed to this end. Her main interest lies on how the politics of development in Latin America are conditioned by the changing structure of the global political economy. Her approach is interdisciplinary, as it interrogates puzzles of international development by drawing from the fields of international political economy and critical geography.

Since 2015, she has been a member of the Editorial Board of Alternautas: (Re)Searching development. a blog dedicated to issues of development in Latin America that publishes peer-reviewed articles as well as translations of texts by Latin American scholars. 

• Environmental Politics
• Natural Resource Governance
• Global Political Economy
• Political Economy of Development
• Latin American Politics

Authored book

• Grugel, J., Barlow, M., Lines, T., Giraudo, M. E., & Jessica, O. (2022). The Gendered Face of COVID-19 in the Global South. The Development, Gender and Health Nexus. Bristol University Press

Journal Article

• Hejnowicz, A. P., Thorn, J. P. R., Giraudo, M. E., Sallach, J. B., Hartley, S. E., Grugel, J., Pueppke, S. G., & Emberson, L. (2022). Appraising the Water‐Energy‐Food Nexus From a Sustainable Development Perspective: A Maturing Paradigm?. Earth's Future, 10(12), Article e2021EF002622. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021ef002622
• Giraudo, M. E., & Grugel, J. (2022). Imaginaries of Soy and the Costs of Commodity-led Development: Reflections from Argentina. Development and Change, 53(4), 796-826. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12714
• Omukuti, J., Barlow, M., Giraudo, M. E., Lines, T., & Grugel, J. (2021). Systems thinking in Covid-19 recovery is urgently needed to deliver sustainable development for women and girls. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), E921-E928. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2542-5196%2821%2900232-1
• Giraudo, M. E. (2021). Taxing the ‘crop of the century’: the role of institutions in governing the soy boom in South America. Globalizations, 18(4), 516-532. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1795426
• Giraudo, M. E. (2019). Dependent development in South America: China and the soybean nexus. Journal of Agrarian Change, 20(1), 60-78. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12333
• Copley, J., & Giraudo, M. E. (2019). Depoliticizing space: The politics of governing global finance. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 37(3), 442-460. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654418786249