Celebrating 10 years of the Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship

Warfare, refugee crises, economic inequality, epidemics, and climate change are some of the many pressing issues that have impacts both within and across national borders. For the past 10 years the Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship Programme has brought together 34 exceptional early-career academics from 19 developing and emerging countries to conduct research on pressing challenges in the global economy. Fellows have spent a year with the Global Economic Governance Programme at University College in Oxford and a year with the Woodrow Wilson School in Princeton, working with Professors Ngaire Woods, Robert Keohane, John Ikenberry, Thomas Hale, and Emily Jones.

Fellows have had the opportunity to further their academic research and deepen their professional networks. They have conducted first-rate research on a wide range of topics, from the politics of Vietnam’s accession to the World Trade Organisation to the ethics of migration, from financial regulation in Bolivia to gender-based violence in the aftermath of civil war in Sierra Leone and Liberia. GLFs are now based all over the world, and have gone on to careers in academia, to establish research institutes, into government research institutes, into international organisations, and even into politics. For more about each of the GLFs, see their profiles.

In June 2018 we were delighted to host a reunion of the Global Leaders Fellows in Oxford, with 23 Fellows from 16 countries returning to Oxford to engage with each other and faculty for a fantastic two days of discussion and debate. We examined the implications of rising China for different regions of the world, contemporary challenges in the global economy from the perspective of developing and emerging economies, the politics of climate policy, and state-building. For a discussion on women’s leadership we were honoured to be joined by Louise Richardson, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Nannerl Keohane, former president of Wellesley College and Duke University, and Ngaire Woods, Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government and co-founder of the GLF Programme.

The Global Leadership Fellows Programme formally ended with the June 2018 Colloquium. We express our sincere gratitude to the donors whose philanthropic donation made the Programme possible, and to our administrators Reija Fanous, Patricia Trinity, and Emma Burnett. We are sad that the Programme is coming to an end, but we know that the network the fellows have developed will remain strong, and that the spirit of the GLF Programme will to live on in the research and policy initiatives of the Fellows in their respective fields.