Dr. Reza Omidi

Dr. Reza Omidi is a researcher at the  Department of Development Policy and Postcolonial Studies. His main research works have focused on social inequalities, solidarity, political economy, contemporary economic history, and social policy developments in Iran. Recently he has extended his studies in political economy and welfare regime in the Middle East. Reza holds a bachelor's degree in management, and master and PhD's degree in social policy. His master's thesis was a critical analysis of Iran's development plans between 1940s and 2000s. In this work, he focused on the influence of the global development discourse and international political environment on the developments of Iran's development plans and path and its alignments and disparities. In his PhD’s thesis (2010-2014), he tried to studied the discursive and structural conflicts in shaping the social welfare system in Iran.

As lecturer and assistant professor (2011-2023) he has taught courses such as Social Policy, Education Policy, Poverty and Inequality, Regional Inequalities, Critical Analysis of Development plans, Comparative Social Policy, the Sociology of Inequality, and the History and Thoughts of Cooperation and Solidarity Economy.

His academic outputs encompass a range of works in social policy and social solidarity, policy conflict analysis, and the political economy of the social policy in Iran. Some of Reza’s publications in recent years include: “conflict and policy failure,” (2020) in the Iranian Journal of Social Problems, “Conceptual and theoretical relation from poverty toward social exclusion,” (2010) in the Journal of Social Development and Welfare Planning, co-author in two book chapters in social policy in Iran: main components and institutions, (2022) New York: Routledge: “Education policy in Iran: developments over the past four decades,” and “development of Iran’s social welfare institutions,” a book chapter in Iran’s Economy and Labour in the Twentieth Century, London, Bloomsbury. (under publish- 2025), “The Political Economy of Social Policy Developments in Iran: 1920s-1970s”. Additionally, he has managed and edited the translation of articles on the welfare state into Persian, which has been published in two volumes: “Rethinking the welfare state” and “Welfare state; left and right perspectives”.