Sara M. Roy is an American political economist and scholar. She is a senior scholar at Harvard University focusing on Middle Eastern studies. As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, her Jewish identity is deeply rooted in the memory of her parents’ suffering, which has driven her to dedicate her academic career to the pursuit of social justice and universal human rights.
Her most notable achievement is the pioneering theory of “de-development,” which systematically analyzes how the Gaza Strip’s economy has been institutionally dismantled under occupation. Her seminal work, “The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development,” is globally recognized as the definitive scholarly text on the region’s structural decline. Through rigorous empirical analysis, she transformed our understanding of how political policies can deliberately undermine a society’s productive potential and capacity for growth.
Since 1985, Roy has documented the humanitarian crises in Gaza through extensive field research and used her academic influence to publicly condemn the blockade. She maintains that the core of the Jewish spirit is to oppose all forms of oppression; thus, she steadfastly supports Palestinian dignity and the right to exist, emphasizing that true peace can only be achieved by ending institutionalized injustice.