My work aims to understand how global capitalism shapes and constrains the possibility of achieving just, sustainable, and emancipatory socio-economic development. To this end, I have been pursuing answers to three sets of questions:

• What are the material conditions and ideological strategies that animate environmental social resistance against certain development projects? Put differently, does class matter to our understanding of contemporary environmental conflicts?
• How do developmental states construct and maintain their legitimacy as they negotiate the relationship between nature and global capitalism? What is the relationship between authoritarian developmentalism and neoliberalism?
• How do the concepts of progress, modernization and sustainability, which continue to show surprising resilience, get adapted to contemporary development theory and praxis? Does the traditional focus of development studies on 'the South' still have analytical purchase? 

Most of my empirical research has focused on Turkey and Ecuador, though I have also written more broadly on Central Asia, Latin America, and China.