Dr Irna Hofman

Irna Hofman is a rural sociologist, specialised in agrarian and social change in Central Asia. She is a lecturer at Leiden University's Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.

Irna completed a Post-Doctoral Research Project at Oxford’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (2019-2022). She obtained her Ph.D. from Leiden University, the Netherlands in 2019, with a dissertation focused on the political economy of agrarian transformation in Tajikistan: "Cotton, control, and continuity in disguise: The political economy of agrarian transformation in lowland Tajikistan." She holds an B.Sc. and an M.Sc. in Environmental Sciences (Environmental Policy), with minors in Rural Development Sociology, and Rural Sociology, respectively, from Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

Irna actively engages in policy advice and outreach. She is a research associate of the Second Cold War Observatory initiative, and has advised various international organisations working in and on Central Asia, with a focus on rural development, water management, gender, migration and conflict, including the EU, the ADB, the IOM, and several smaller NGOs.

Irna's research interests are broad and sit at the intersection of political economy, political ecology, and political sociology. She currently completes a research project of focused on Chinese agri-tech in Central Asia, funded by the Delta on the Move foundation. Her research agenda for the coming years centres on the rural everyday of geopolitics, with a focus on China's growing assertiveness in the global agrifood regime, shifting geographies of production, and rural labour.

• Hofman, I. (2025) Everyday Politics of Global China: Looking to, Reflecting on, and Enacting Authority in Rural Tajikistan. Development and Change (early view).
• Hofman, I. (2025) Which and whose rules rule? Chinese agribusinesses and the challenge of compliance in rural Tajikistan. Regulation and Governance (early view).
• Hofman, I. (2024) Seeds of empire or seeds of friendship? The politics of the diffusion of Chinese crop seeds in Tajikistan. Journal of Agrarian Change, 24(2): e12581.
• Hofman, I. (2021) Migration, crop diversification, and adverse incorporation: Understanding the repertoire of contention in rural Tajikistan. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 42(4): 499-518.
• Hofman, I. (2018) Soft budgets and elastic debt: Farm liabilities in the agrarian political economy of post-Soviet Tajikistan. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(7): 1360-81.

Commentaries, op-eds and blogs (selected)

• Hofman, I. (2025) Relating and differentiating: Navigating worlds and negotiating positionality in research on Chinese agribusinesses in rural Tajikistan. Global China Pulse, 4(2)
• Hofman, I. (2023) Bim and bumpy roads in Tajikistan: A dog as guard and companion "in the field". Rural Sociology Weblog, 23 March 2023.
• Hofman, I. (2022) Just working for wood: life inside Tajikistan’s silk industry. Open Democracy, 11 August.
• Hofman, I. (2022) Tajikistan. The people's map of global China.
• Hofman, I. (2021) In the interstices of patriarchal order: Spaces of female agency in Chinese-Tajik labour encounters. Made in China, #2 May-August 2021.