Dr Matthew Sterling Benson-Strohmayer

Dr Matthew Sterling Benson-Strohmayer is a scholar of war, peace, and political order whose research sits at the intersection of International Relations, economic history, and political economy. His work examines how states are built – and unbuilt – through revenue systems that finance conflict, sustain elites, and shape civic resistance and state formation. Africa is his empirical foundation and the vantage point from which the global fiscal politics of war and peace becomes legible. His work demonstrates that the Sudans are not peripheral cases, but central sites for understanding how fiscal power, conflict, and negotiated civic resistance structure political orders globally. He is Research Fellow and Sudans Research Director in the Conflict & Civicness Research Group (CCRG) and affiliate faculty in the Department of Economic History at LSE.

Benson-Strohmayer’s work develops concepts such as the revenue complex, civic fiscal resistance, and predatory peace to analyse how revenue and rule intersect across time and place. He uses the term predatory peace to describe peace settlements that reorganise, rather than dismantle, coercive fiscal systems, securing political order through the reconfiguration of extractive infrastructures.

His first book, Of Rule Not Revenue: Predation, State-Unbuilding, and Conflict in Sudan and South Sudan, 1821-2023, has been formally invited for peer review by Cambridge University Press (African Studies Series) following endorsement by the editorial board in May 2025. Drawing on over 700 interviews and extensive archival research across Sudanese, South Sudanese, colonial, and rebel-held collections, the book investigates how fiscal systems underpin enduring patterns in the structures of rule, peacemaking, and war-making. His second book, Predatory Peace: The Making and Unmaking of Post-Cold War Order, extends this framework comparatively across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, examining how post-Cold War peace settlements reorganise wartime political economies across multiple regions.

Benson-Strohmayer’s work has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, among other outlets. He is co-editing a forthcoming Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding special issue on global fragmentation and contributes to research on the ethics and methodologies of working with in-country civic networks in conflict-affected settings. This work reflects a commitment to research that speaks to the communities and contexts from which it is drawn, informed by two decades of professional experience bridging policy, operations, and field research – including posts in Sudan with Médecins Sans Frontières and in South Sudan with Crown Agents, and work with the World Bank, the Rift Valley Institute, and UNHCR.

At LSE, Benson-Strohmayer teaches EH413: African Economic Development in Historical Perspective, and has previously taught political economy, conflict, and the Global South at Durham University, LSE, and the University of Sussex. He holds a PhD and MA in History from Durham (ESRC-funded), an MA in Governance and Development from IDS, and a BA in International Relations from Tufts University.

He regularly contributes to media outlets including the BBC and Al Jazeera. Dr Benson-Strohmayer's academic website, including a full list of publications, is available here.