Anja Shortland

• Reader in Political Economy, King's College London

Dr Anja Shortland is Professor in Political Economy in the Department of Political Economy At King'S College. London. Anja was an Engineering and Economics undergraduate at Oxford and then did her Masters and PhD in International Relations at the LSE. Before coming to King's she worked as a lecturer in Economics at Leicester, a Reader in Economics at Brunel University and as a consultant to the World Bank.

Anja studies private governance in the world's trickiest markets: hostages, fine art, antiquities, and ransomware-and how people live, trade, and invest in complex and hostile territories. Her work often cuts across disciplinary boundaries adopting techniques and insights from sociology, engineering, geography, politics, international relations and economics.

Anja's research focuses on how people structure trades in markets where states do not reliably provide law and order. How can legal entities successfully transact with (transnational) criminal enterprises? How do private enterprises control and discourage criminal activity when law enforcement is weak? Anja has published widely on the issue of kidnap and hijack for ransom, art recovery, and ransomware. She co-authored the 2013 World Bank Policy Report: The Pirates of Somalia: Ending the Threat; Rebuilding a Nation. Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Lost Art: The Art Loss Register's Casebook was published by Unicorn Press in June 2021. We Know You Can Pay a Million: Inside the Dark Economy of Hacking and Ransomware is published by Profile Books in April 2026.

• –present Reader in Political Economy, King's College London

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