José Ciro Martínez is a Lecturer in the Department of International Development. His research lies at the intersection of comparative politics, cultural anthropology and political theory, drawing on archival and ethnographic methods. He is committed to modes of inquiry attentive to the seemingly ordinary and mundane and has conducted fieldwork in Jordan, Syria, Morocco and Spain.

Prior to joining King's, José was a Lecturer in Politics at the University of York and Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He is a recipient of the Watson, Fulbright and Gates Cambridge fellowships and was François Chevalier Visiting Fellow at the Madrid Institute of Advanced Study (2024-2025). In 2024, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Politics.

José is the author of an award winning monograph, States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022), which builds on more than a year working as a baker in Amman. A second project, tentatively entitled ‘Sovereign Haze: Hashish, Order and Authority in the Western Mediterranean,’ explores practices of government and the political life of commodities by way of the production and trafficking of hashish.

José also informally advises regional and national MPs of the Spanish political party Podemos.

Research

• Comparative Politics
• Political Anthropology
• Middle East/North Africa
• Ethnography
• Political Theory
• Resistance

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 5YYD0010 Approaches to Researching Development: Qualitative Methods

Postgraduate

• 7YYDW001 Foundations of Development Theory

PhD supervision

José welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in the contemporary politics of the Middle East and North Africa. He is particularly interested in proposals that explore theories of sovereignty, resistance and state power, as well as those empirically concerned with food and drugs.

Further details

See José's research profile