Project at HIAS
Accumulation under Constraint: Fossil Regime Restructuring and Infrastructural Vulnerability in Iran
At HIAS, Ida Nikou investigates how sanctions reorganise petrochemical production and export circuits in Iran. The project examines how restrictions on finance, trade, and technology shape state policies and investment prioritise in production and export infrastructure. It asks how efforts to preserve exports and foreign-exchange earnings can reinforce fossil dependence while concentrating risk at key ports, pipelines and transport routes. Using policy documents and sectoral and infrastructure data, the study traces these processes across periods of intensified sanctions.
Her Tandem Partner is Eckart Woertz, Director of the GIGA Institute for Middle East Studies and Professor for contemporary history and politics of the Middle East at the University of Hamburg.
Website
Funding
The HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.
Tandem
Prof. Dr. Eckart Woertz, Middle East Studies, German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA)
Biography
Ida Nikou began her academic training in Iran, earning a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering before moving into sociology. She later earned an MA in Sociology from the University of Houston and, in 2025, a PhD in Sociology from Stony Brook University (SUNY), where she taught as a lecturer. She received a Judith Tanur Fellowship for her dissertation research and Stony Brook’s President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student. She serves as an editor of the Global Labour Journal, and her public writing has appeared in MERIP, Global Labour Column, and Jadaliyya.
Ida Nikou works at the intersection of international political economy, development and labour studies. Her research examines accumulation under constraint, asking how sanctions reshape development under unequal integration into the world economy. Her dissertation traced how sanctions and financialisation reconfigured industrial labour regimes and workers’ collective power in Iran. Later work broadens the analysis to sectoral restructuring and class inequality produced by economic restructuring under sanctions. The project extends this trajectory to the infrastructures that organise and sustain accumulation under sanctions.
Ida Nikou is HIAS – Käte Hamburger Kolleg Research Fellow on this year’s theme ‘Worlds of Raw Materials – Cultures in Transition’. Her HIAS stay is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy. Afterwards, she will continue her research at the University of Kassel.
Image Information
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using EO-1 ALI data provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 team