Zach Kalmann's research uses the energy system as a site from which to interrogate the relationship between democracy and capitalism. His book project uses the ongoing electricity crisis in South Africa to examine why the optimism of the transition from apartheid to liberal democratic capitalism has soured into an unfolding crisis marked by economic stagnation and popular disaffection with liberal democracy. Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic, archival, and interview-based research, he argues that the governing African National Congress's efforts to overcome apartheid's racial inequities through market reforms generated contradictions that not only crippled the electricity system, but have driven the broader crisis in South Africa. The project suggests that the crises rippling across the global liberal order today can similarly be traced to the contradictions that emerged between market reforms and the visions of social improvement that animated and underpinned their adoption.

Zach holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a BA in History and Politics from the University of Oxford.