David Karas

David Karas is a French-Hungarian political economist working as a Post-doctoral Researcher at the CEU Democracy Institute, Central European University. His research focuses on developmental policies in emerging economies, particularly examining how a pivot to Sub-Saharan Africa is reshaping governance within the European Development Finance Architecture (EFAD).

Dr. Karas holds an MA in Comparative Politics from Sciences Po Paris, an MA in Nationalism Studies from CEU, and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute. He has taught international political economy and international relations at multiple institutions including OSF's CSLA Fellowship program, Manipal University in India, the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, ELTE University in Hungary, and Webster University in Vienna.

His research interests span political economy, authoritarian financialization, monetary policy in emerging markets, industrial policy, and de- and re-democratization processes. Dr. Karas employs a regulationist approach to analyze how change and stasis coexist within different social fields and institutional subsystems of capitalism, with particular focus on cases like Hungary and Turkey where executive centralization fails to solve contradictory objectives of stabilizing sovereign and private debt markets.

Dr. Karas has published extensively on topics including authoritarian financialization, state capitalism, and developmental strategies in the EU's periphery. His recent work examines industrial policies in electric batteries, highlighting how a regulationist approach can illuminate comparative political economy across American and European capitalism.

• A Regulationist Perspective on Industrial Policy in the US and the EU (2024)
• Crises of Authoritarian Financialization: Monetary Policy in Hungary and Türkiye in the Polycrisis (2023)
• Industrial Policy Isn't a Panacea for Rebuilding Organized Labor (2023)

Dr. Karas is the creator of Poliko Podcast, a platform showcasing innovative empirical and theoretical research in political economy. He has appeared as a guest on the "Roundtable" podcast by the Second Cold War Observatory, discussing how great power rivalry plays out across eastern Europe, and has contributed articles to Jacobin on topics including industrial policy and European capitalism.