Changing Course

October 12th, 2026 Professor of Political Science Ayse Kaya helps students interpret an uncertain world across borders and perspectives.

Written by
Tomas Weber

Photography
Laurence Kesterson

For years, Professor of Political Science Ayse Kaya had a problem. 

How do you make the architecture of the global economy sound remotely interesting over dinner? Tariffs and trade regimes. Multilateral coordination and the inner workings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Exchange rates and capital flows. Outside of specialist circles, they were not topics that naturally sparked curiosity. 

But then, suddenly, they did. 

This year, the U.S. stepped back from more than 50 international institutions, many of which it helped build. Trade wars are now policy, and tariffs have skyrocketed. The abstractions that Kaya spent her career studying have become the focus of near-daily anxiety, dominating the headlines and triggering uncertainty around the world. 

“Concepts that once seemed obscure have been revealed as deeply relevant to our daily lives, unfortunately,” says Kaya, co-founder of Swarthmore’s Global Studies Program. 

Raised in Istanbul and educated at Wellesley College, Kaya arrived at the London School of Economics intending to study nationalism. Then she quickly pivoted, a transition she still can’t fully explain. She attended a dense, technical lecture on trade policy and she was hooked. 

“There are certain things you cannot put down to clear factors,” she says. “I think I probably found it very challenging, and that I was drawn to that challenge.” 

What followed was a career analyzing the framework of global economic power and its myriad institutional manifestations: the IMF, the World Bank, and the rules and institutions that control the movement of capital and influence. 

Her work has overturned long-held assumptions in the international political economy. 

When countries get richer, political scientists tend to assume, they also become more powerful on the global stage. But Kaya, in her 2015 book Power and Global Economic Institutions, revealed that economic success does not convert naturally into institutional power. Institutions like the IMF or the World Bank are not neutral forums. Some accelerate the translation of economic strength into political power. But others can dilute it or delay it. 

“There is no one-to-one relationship between economic and political power,” says Kaya. “International institutions act as adjusters or intermediaries. In some cases, institutions slow down the translation from economic to political strength.”

Ayse Kaya

“Our students, in this rapidly changing world, one in which the U.S. may not be at the center, need to understand how to view events from a global perspective.”

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Ayse Kaya

It’s an insight that helps explain the current moment. The U.S. retreat from international institutions that were helping constrain rising powers like China is, says Kaya, a strategic misstep. Abandoning them removes mechanisms that were helping to amplify U.S. global strength. 

Both the left and the right have criticized the IMF over the years, and Kaya has no illusions that it’s a purely benign organization. Still, she insists that global economic institutions create something valuable: predictability. Growing up in a deeply unequal society, she says, drew her to questions of who wins and who loses, and predictability matters most to those with the least. 

“When a crisis hits, people with fewer resources have fewer means to throw at that unpredictability,” she says. “Global economic institutions give information to policymakers and create rules that reduce policy uncertainty.”

In 2023, Kaya stepped briefly from academia into government through a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship, one of just five awarded nationwide that year. For Kaya, a naturalized U.S. citizen, working on climate policy at the State Department was a source of pride, as well as a close-up education in how policy gets made. 

The experience also sharpened questions that are driving her current research on the World Bank’s climate finance, examining who receives it, what it pays for, and whether it meaningfully reduces emissions. 

Much of the apparent surge in climate finance since the 2015 Paris Agreement has been “mainstreamed” into broader development projects, blurring the line between genuine climate action and other kinds of development. But where, Kaya asks, does mainstreaming end and greenwashing begin? 

The same instincts that power Kaya’s research have led her to help expand what Swarthmore offers students. 

Together with Associate Professor of Modern Languages & Literatures - French & Francophone Studies Carina Yervasi, Kaya built the Global Studies Program out of her conviction that, in a geopolitically fragmenting world, students need the capacity to interpret events across borders and perspectives. Languages, she argues, are an invaluable skill set that gives access to information from a fundamentally different point of view. 

“Our students,” Kaya says, “in this rapidly changing world, one in which the U.S. may not be at the center, need to understand how to view events from a global perspective.”

Does her expertise make her more or less anxious than the average news reader these days? On that point, Kaya hesitates, choosing her words carefully. 

Growing up under authoritarian rule in Turkey, she watches with alarm today’s erosion of democratic norms across the world, alongside policy responses that diagnose real problems but offer flawed solutions. At the same time, she insists on optimism. 

“I feel we have no choice but to be optimistic,” she says. “So we can think of creative solutions.”

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