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Purpose and Activities of IPEG

The main purpose of IPEG is to bring together scholars and students with an interest in IPE. It provides a forum where they can meet to discuss their work, and also seeks when appropriate to further the interests of this broad and growing academic community within the UK. IPEG is currently one of the principal working groups under the umbrella of BISA, with just over 240 members. While the majority of these are British, there are many IPEG members who live and work in Europe, North America, Africa, Asia and Australasia. The IPEG Directory provides a searchable networking tool which lists IPEG members, their research interests and contact details.

IPEG’s most important activities are:

  • the annual workshop, held in early June at a different venue each year, which follows a theme agreed upon at the previous year’s Annual General Meeting. The 2006 workshop was hosted by Lancaster University on the theme of ‘Rolling Back Neo-Liberalism?’, and the 2005 workshop was held at Nottingham Trent University on ‘The State of IPE’. In previous years, themes have included ‘Global and Regional Governance’, ‘The New Politics of Development’, ‘Political Economy and Manifold Capitalism’, ‘Global Inequality and the Politics of Inclusion’, ‘Transparency in the Global Political Economy’; ‘Financial Crisis and the Global Political Economy: causes and consequences’, ‘Pathways to IPE’, ‘The Globalisation versus Internationalisation Debate’, ‘The Post-war Order at Fifty’, and ‘Liberalisation in the Global Economy’. They have been hosted by a wide variety of institutions, including the Universities of Hull, Warwick, Newcastle, Leeds, and Sussex. The workshops are organised by IPEG members after they have obtained funding from their institution to stage this event. IPEG assists this initiative by providing logistical support and funding for members to attend. By encouraging members to sponsor and organise these workshops, which are usually attended by between 30-50 members, IPEG remains close to the research interests of its members. The event is usually free to IPEG members, while a nominal cost is levied on non-members.

  • the IPEG Papers in Global Political Economy Series. An excellent resource for both research and teaching in IPE, the Series now features over twenty papers. Submissions to the Series by postgraduate and early career members on IPEG are especially welcome. If you are interested in submitting a paper to the Series, please contact the Series Editor Matthew Eagleton-Pierce (m.eagleton-pierce@exeter.ac.uk).

IPE in Britain

International political economy (IPE) is a robust and growing field of study in Britain, as it is indeed around the world. The number of students taking courses in IPE is growing, and this is especially evident at the post-graduate level. From only one post-graduate degree course available two decades ago, there are now seven places in which students can take a post-graduate degree in IPE: at the University of Manchester, the London School of Economics, the University of Warwick, the University of Sussex, the University of Newcastle, the University of Leeds and the University of Sheffield. But the number of universities at which students can take IPE-related modules is larger still, and the number of academics undertaking to teach and do research in IPE grows every year.

On the research side here in the UK, two developments in IPE are important. Over the 1990s IPE became much more strongly institutionalised within British academia with the establishment of two research centres that see political economy broadly construed as their primary mandate. The Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) at the University of Sheffield has been operating since 1993. Its central concern is to explore recent transformations in national and global political economy. It has run a number of major conferences to date, including most recently ‘Multilevel Governance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ (2001), ‘The Political Economy of Development’ (2002), ‘Resource Politics’ (2003) and ‘Labour Movements in the Twenty First Century’ (2004), and is home to the journal New Political Economy (see below). The University of Warwick’s Centre for Globalisation and Regionalisation, directed by Richard Higgott and Jan Aart Scholte and funded jointly by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the University of Warwick, was established in 1997. Its inaugural conference was held in 1997 on ‘Non-State Actors and Authority in the Global System’, and subsequent conferences have included ‘Globalisation, Growth and (In)Equality’ (2002), and ‘International Financial Crises: What Follows the Washington Consensus?’ (2003).

Just as important as these institutional developments has been the growth of a number of journals and book series which see IPE as a key part of their publishing profile. Journals such as the Review of International Political Economy, New Political Economy, and Competition and Change now provide research outlets for IPE scholarship which augments that provided by more mainstream and longer-established journals. At the same time, book publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Palgrave (Macmillan), and Routledge all have extensive, exciting and growing IPE lists.

All of these developments make Britain an exciting place in which to teach and undertake research in IPE, and IPEG is an important part of this.