Cyrus Afshar

Cyrus holds bachelor’s degrees in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo and in Journalism from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. He worked at CBN news radio station and completed a year-long university exchange programme at IEP-Université Lyon (France) before joining Folha de São Paulo newspaper, where he was a reporter for two years. He then worked as a communications manager with Instituto Polis, a Brazilian NGO that researches urban public policies.

In 2010, he joined the Erasmus Mundus Master’s Programme in Public Policy and received an MA in Development Studies (Governance and Democracy specialization) from the Institute of Social Studies and an MA in International Relations from Ibei (Spain). As a research intern at UNRISD in Geneva, he supported an international conference on Social and Solidarity Economy. Subsequently, he worked as a research assistant on an academic project on Argentine indigenous movements and state capacity at Ibei. Back in Brazil, he worked at Dieese (a Brazilian labour union think-tank) as a research officer, studying labour topics such as turnover, youth employment, informal labour, and women’s participation in Porto Alegre and in São Paulo.

He has worked for WIEGO, an international NGO focused on informal employment research and advocacy since 2016. He has been working as WIEGO's Social Protection officer since 2018, providing support in research, programme management and communications.

He started his PhD programme at ISS in March 2024, under the supervisation of professor Karim Knio. Cyrus' research project will explore the political economy of crises, using the government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as a case to understand the underlying processes of neoliberalization and the nature of crises.