Oscar Ugarteche

Tenured researcher at the Institute of Economic Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is a member of CONACYT's National System of Researchers and has been awarded several prizes and recognitions throughout his career, including the National University Prize for Economic Research in 2021.

He holds a BA in Finance from Fordham University in New York, an MSc in International Finance from the London Business School, and a PhD in History and Philosophy from the University of Bergen. He has also received an Honorary Doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín in Peru.

His areas of interest include international financial architecture, Latin American financial integration, the history of Latin American economic thought, international economics, global political economy and changes in the energy matrix.

He has published 30 books, 103 articles and 49 book chapters. He is currently working on a research project on China and the changing energy matrix in Mexico, from a global political economy perspective. He is also the coordinator of the Economic Observatory of Latin America (OBELA) and a Mexican Academy of Sciences member since 2020.

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2026 | José Luis GázquezMás información

The works gathered in this volume address diverse topics related with current global issues such as geopolitics of energy, climate change, development, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, and capitalism. They do so by placing Africa at the epicenter of those issues. Indeed, while diverse in their areas of inquiry the chapters that constitute this book all share in common the methodological concern of (re)centering Africa in the study of global affairs.

By doing so the authors of this book recognize not only the importance of re-calibrating the place of Africa in the social sciences from a standpoint that does not marginalize the continent and its societies but that on the contrary, highlight their central and crucial role in them.

For instance, if we consider together the issue of climate change and development we find out that Africa, while being the continent that has less contributed to the global emissions of carbon dioxide is both the most affected by the ongoing extractive capitalist activities and their multiple negative impacts on its ecosystems and the one that has benefitted the less from them.

In fact, one of the main arguments of this book is to show how this marginalization of Africa’s place in the global political economy stems from a marginal position of the continent in social sciences and how by (re)framing it as the world’s epicenter we can shed light both on contemporary global affairs and epistemological issues regarding not only Africa but other societies of the Global South as well.