With heavy hearts, we mourn the sudden and untimely passing of our dear friend and colleague, Dr. Samuel Segura Cobos, and we extend our deepest condolences to his family.
Samuel’s warmth, intellect, and generosity of spirit will be deeply missed.
Samuel was a Mexican citizen. He held a BA in International Relations from the Tecnológico de Monterrey, a Certificate in International Politics from the University of British Columbia, Canada and a Master in International Relations from Macquarie University, Australia.
After working at Amnesty International Mexico, Samuel moved to Geneva to pursue a Master in Development Studies at the Geneva Graduate Institute. In 2013, he began his doctoral studies at the International History Department with a specialisation in international political economy and economic, financial and legal history.
His research focused on the emergence of export credit agencies in the London and New York financial markets during the first half of the twentieth century. Following a year of support from the Pierre du Bois Foundation (2013-2014), his research project was awarded a Doc.CH grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation in August 2014.
Samuel was an academic mentor for the international programme at Smith College in Geneva (2014-2015) and a research assistant at the Geneva Graduate Institute's Centre for Finance and Development (2013-2018). From 2019 to 2020, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Centre for Ethics and the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University. He also served as a consultant in London and Singapore for multinational companies and governments on issues such as institutional change, sustainability, well-being and trade law.
Since August 2021, Samuel was Assistant Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. As a historian and social scientist, his research focused on the institutional diversity that facilitates exchange relations across societies. This study highlighted the role that expectations, beliefs, worldviews, norms, rules, and organisations play in institutional complexes that enable the growing separation in time and space of exchange transactions.
Samuel’s warmth, intellect, and generosity of spirit will be deeply missed.
Research Projects and Publications
In 2014, Samuel was the Principal Member of the SNIS research project, lead by Marc Flandreau, on Taxation and International Development: North-South Conflicts over Capital Flight and International Taxation Issues after WWII (1945-1970) This project aimed to renew studies on capital flight and tax evasion of poor countries by going back to the origin of this issue, namely the post-war period. This research tried to understand why no multilateral regulation against capital flight and tax evasion was implemented between 1945 and 1970.
In March 2015, while a PhD student at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Samuel was selected to receive funding from Davis Projects for Peace 2015 to work on Mexican Disappearances. In the context of high levels of violence and grave human rights abuses in Mexico, his project, “We Will Never Forget: Accompanying Families of Missing People”, aimed to help the relatives of more than 23,000 victims of enforced disappearances since 2006, and about 1,200 cases from the period known as the “Dirty War” in Mexican history (1960s-1980s).
In 2018, he co-wrote an article on Epidemia of Walls in an (Un)free World - The “Great Wall” of America: Historical Opportunities in Global Challenges, Issue no. 4 | October 2018 with Riccardo Bocco, Jean-François Bayart, Anuradha Sen Mookerjee, Özcan Yilmaz and Seunghoon Emilia Heo.
In 2018, Samuel obtained his PhD in International History with a Thesis on “Bills, Bonds and Export Credit Agencies: Continuities and Discontinuities in the Management of Moral Hazard in Early Twentieth Century British and American Foreign Debt Markets" Industrial Organisation” (Universtiy of Geneva / Graduate Institute, 2018, co-supervised by Juan Huitzilihuitl Flores Zendejas and Marc Flandreau)
In 2022, Samuel published a paper on Making Money Amnesiac: The 1882 Making of Modern Negotiability in the United Kingdom in Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics Volume 3, Number 1, Winter 2022, University of Pennsylvania Press.