Moses Onyango Ogutu is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the Maxwell School, where his research focuses on the international political economy of global visa regimes and mobility governance.

His dissertation, “Three Essays on the Global Visa Economy,” examines how visa refusal rates, fee extraction and outsourced adjudication produce and sustain a global mobility hierarchy, using the U.S., Schengen and U.K. regimes as the primary analytical lens, and drawing on an original dataset covering 155 nationalities from 1997 to 2024. This work combines large-N empirical analysis with qualitative methods—including process tracing and case comparison—to examine the institutional foundations through which states and private actors construct and sustain hierarchy in global mobility governance, speaking to debates in international political economy, migration studies, and global governance.

His work has appeared in African Studies Quarterly, the South African Journal of International Affairs, Frontiers in Sustainability, and Sustainability Science, among other outlets. His broader research interests span African political economy, science diplomacy and international scientific collaboration, international trade, and global environmental governance—areas he engaged extensively before turning to mobility governance as a unifying analytical lens.

Before joining the Maxwell School, Moses served as associate program officer at the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine—one of the United States' most respected scientific institutions—where he supported international programs under the InterAcademy Partnership spanning science diplomacy, research integrity, climate governance and science systems strengthening across Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe. He has also served as an instructor at the African Leadership University, Rwanda where he taught international business and trade to undergraduate students across Africa.

He holds an M.A. in international relations and an M.Phil. in inclusive innovation, both from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and a B.S. in political science from the University of Mauritius. He is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar, Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow, Bertha Scholar, and Dalai Lama Fellow. He is completing a Ph.D. with an expected defense date of spring 2027.