School of Social and Political Science

Research interests

Political and economic anthropology, Law and society, Taxation and citizenship, Borderlands, Infrastructure, West and Central Africa, Cameroon, Chad

Muñoz has conducted extensive fieldwork in Cameroon and its neighbouring countries on topics ranging from business organisation and public administration reform to corporate social responsibility, corruption, and taxation.

For the last six years, Muñoz has been part of AFRIGOS, an European Research Council-funded project led by Paul Nugent, which investigated the patterns of governance that are emerging across the African continent out of unprecedented levels of investment  in transport infrastructure. The project has allowed Muñoz to conduct extensive fieldwork in Chad and Cameroon, gaining insight into the lived experience and perspectives of representatives of multilateral and bilateral lenders, government officials, managers of construction companies, freight forwarders, trucking companies, and drivers and their unions. Available in open access, the edited volume Transport Corridors in Africa (James Currey) offers a sample of the project team's research.

Muñoz's publications include Doing Business in Cameroon: An Anatomy of Economic Governance (International African Library, Cambridge University Press), an ethnographic monograph that explores how different business practices and repertoires have enabled distinct modes of governing the economy in the city of Ngaoundere (Cameroon) from the colonial era to the present. Based on fieldwork and archival research, it analyzes four arenas of the provincial economy—the cattle trade, freight transport, public contracting, and the projects of non-governmental organizations—to offer a fresh perspective on economic governance that interrogates the effects of prevalent dichotomies between formal and informal economies.

Topics interested in supervising

Economic Anthropology; Legal Anthropology; Anthropology of Finance; Taxes; Bureaucracy; Public Administration; Infrastructure and Technology; Borderlands; Political Ecology; Forestry and Mining; Pastoralism; Islam; Youth; Law and Development; Corporate Social Responsibility; Corruption and Anti-corruption; West and Central Africa; Cameroon; Chad