Other News

Ben Clift’s co-authored article ‘Remembering and Forgetting IPE: Disciplinary History as Boundary Work’ (with Peter Marcus Kristensen and former PAIS legend Ben Rosamond - both at the University of Copenhagen), is the lead article in the latest issue (Vol. 29, No. 2) of Review of International Political Economy

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2020.1826341

First presented to PAIS’s IPE cluster in November 2017, where the authors received fabulously helpful and constructive comments, this work explores the disciplinary politics of IPE as a field by lifting the lid on the ‘boundary work’ that disciplinary histories in textbooks perform. The paper analyses how academic gatekeepers in positions of disciplinary influence shape perceptions about appropriate conduct within the field, what constitutes its core, and what lies outside its realm. Disciplinary history entails forgetting certain events, scholars and works that do not fit the prevailing chronology, marginalising or excluding some topics, debates and questions from the core of the field. We evidence our claims about the boundary work done in narrating IPE’s origins through bibliometric mapping and network analysis of IPE citation patterns and practices. We find that IPE is a narrower, more blinkered field than it typically presents itself to be.

Professor Vicki Squire was recently interviewed for the New Books Network on her book Europe’s Migration Crisis: Border Deaths and Human Dignity (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

You can listen to her discussion with by Dr Lamis Abdelaaty of the book’s main findings and concerns here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/europes-migration-crisis

A collection of previously untranslated writings by Henri Lefebvre on rural sociology, situating his research in relation to wider Marxist work has been published by University of Minnesota Press.

Stuart Elden (PAIS) and Adam David Morton (University of Sydney) have edited Lefebvre’s key works on rural questions, including the first half of his book Du rural à l’urbain and supplementary texts. On the Rural reveals the production of the rural as a key site of capitalist development and as a space of struggle.

The book was translated by Robert Bononno, with one essay each by Matthew Dennis (formerly Warwick Philosophy) and Sîan Rosa Hunter Dodsworth. Stuart and Adam edited the texts, add detailed notes, and wrote a substantial introduction.

Further details of the book here - https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/on-the-rural

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just issued the Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change Mitigation.

This research represents a global consensus on climate mitigation, sources of emissions, progress towards meeting targets, and the impact of national climate pledges on long-term emissions goals.

The report cites PAIS scholars, including six papers by Simon Caney and four by Caroline Kuzemko. Their work explores, and highlights the importance of, ethical considerations and political institutions respectively.

Ben Clift’s latest article in British Politics finds UK technocratic fiscal policy-making to be a more social and political process than many advocates of economic rules-based policy acknowledge. The article delineates a yawning gap between the theory and practice of technocratic economic governance, which is saturated with politics. Fiscal rules engender new forms of contested politics and elite statecraft and expert technocracy.as rules are circumvented, breached or changed.

A related blog post analyses OBR commentary on the Chancellor’s spring statement: https://ukandeu.ac.uk/obr-commentary-on-sunaks-spring-statement/