Irna Hofman

Dr Irna Hofman graduated from Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands, with a major in Environmental Sciences and minors in respectively Rural Development Sociology (B.Sc.) and Rural Sociology (M.Sc), and received her Ph.D. from Leiden University in January 2019. Her dissertation was titled “Cotton, control, and continuity in disguise: The political economy of agrarian transformation in lowland Tajikistan,” for which she conducted long-term fieldwork in rural Tajikistan. 

Irna has rich research experience in and on Central Asia. Before initiating her doctoral research on Tajikistan she studied the political economy of agrarian transformation in Uzbekistan, in her role as junior researcher at the Center for Development Research (Zentrum für Entwicklungsforschung (ZEF)), an institute of the University of Bonn.

Alongside her doctoral research at Leiden University, Irna has been lecturing in China and International Studies at Leiden University. In 2014, she was a temporary research fellow at IAMO, the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies in Halle, Germany. In recent years, Irna has combined academic research with short term consultancies various for international development aid organisations and think tanks focussed on rural development, migration, gender, and conflict in Central Asia.

Irna has published articles in leading international academic journals, including The Journal of Peasant Studies, Land Use Policy, Eurasian Geography and Economics, and contributed chapters to edited book volumes. She engages actively in political and societal debates focussed on rural development problematics, agricultural value chains, labour, migration, gender, and global China.

CLD Research Brief, 2021: Chinese Cotton Diplomacy in Tajikistan: Greasing the Ties by Reviving the Cotton Economy

Encounters After the Soviet Collapse: The Contemporary Chinese Presence in the Former Soviet Union Border Zone, Irna Hofman, OaneVisser & Artemy Kalinovsky.

Migration, crop diversification, and adverse incorporation: understanding the repertoire of contention in rural Tajikistan, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 2021.

In the Interstices of Patriarchal Order: Spaces of Female Agency in Chinese–Tajik Labor Encounters, Made in China Journal, December 2021.

Towards a geography of window dressing and benign neglect: The state, donors and elites in Tajikistan’s trajectories of post-Soviet agrarian change, Irna Hofman & Oane Visser, Land Use Change Policy, December 2021.

The Belt and Road Podcast: Cotton Diplomacy in Central Asia, March 10, 2022.

Just working for wood: life inside Tajikistan’s silk industry, OpenDemocracy, August 11, 2022.