Gainsborough, Martin is reader in development politics in the School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies at the University of Bristol. He is a specialist on the politics of development, with an area specialism on South East Asia, and expertise on state theory, governance, and corruption. Before taking up his post at Bristol, Gainsborough was a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies and holder of a British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Warwick. Gainsborough is known internationally as one of a handful of specialists on Vietnamese politics – a country where he has lived, worked, learnt the language, and conducted fieldwork for over 20 years. He is the author of Vietnam: Rethinking the State (Zed Books, 2010) and Changing Political Economy of Vietnam (Routledge, 2003), and the editor of On the Borders of State Power: Frontiers in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region (Routledge, 2009) and Enterprise and Welfare Reform in Communist Asia (Cass, 2003 with Peter Ferdinand). Gainsborough has consulted for the World Bank, DfID, the UNDP, Transparency International, and BP and has published in The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and the South China Morning Post.