Ida Nikou, PhD

I am a sociologist of international political economy, labour and development. My research asks how sanctions and other forms of geopolitical coercion reshape accumulation, economic governance and class relations, with Iran as my main case.

I hold a 2026–27 research fellowship from the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study (HIAS) and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg at the University of Kassel. My project, Accumulation under Constraint, examines how restrictions on finance, trade and technology are reorganising Iran's fossil economy: how the effort to keep exports moving and foreign exchange coming in under sanctions redirects investment, deepens fossil dependence and concentrates vulnerability in ports, pipelines and transport corridors.

The project builds on my doctoral research at Stony Brook University (PhD in Sociology, 2025). My dissertation, Bread, Job, Freedom, traced how sanctions, financialisation and authoritarian restructuring remade labour regimes and workers' collective power in Iran's steel, mining, heavy-machinery and agro-industrial sectors. Since then my work has moved from the factory to the sector and the state, and to Iran's changing position in the world economy.

I also write for broader audiences on sanctions, labour, imperialism and Iranian politics, in MERIP, Jadaliyya and Global Labour Column, and I am an editor of the Global Labour Journal.

Since 2019 I have designed and taught seven courses at Stony Brook University, in person and online, from a large-enrolment Introduction to Sociology to upper-level courses in social theory, global development, social movements, crime and deviance, and technology. In 2022 I received the university's President's Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student.

In all of them I teach sociology as a way of reading the conflicts, institutions and inequalities students already live inside, and I put classical and contemporary theory to work on the present.