IPEG, short for International Political Economy Group, was formed in 1971 on the initiative of Susan Strange, then with the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. It received a limited amount of funding from the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK in 1974, and became affiliated with the British International Studies Association (BISA) after that organisation was founded in 1974. IPEG has functioned continuously since 1971 except for a brief interval in the late 1980s, and counts among its past Convenors the likes of Susan Strange, Fred Hirsch, Roger Tooze, Geoffrey Underhill, Randall Germain, Rorden Wilkinson, Nicola Phillips, Paul Langley and Stuart Shields and Phoebe Moore. In 2014, BISA switched to a model of co-convenors, with Alex Nunn, Sam Raszewski and Holly Snaith taking over the reins. The current convenors are Daniela Tepe-Belfrage and Johnna Montgomerie.
Purposes 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 we can meet to discuss our work, and also seeks when appropriate to further the interests of this broad and growing academic community within the UK. IPEG is one of the principal working groups under the umbrella of BISA, with just over 400 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 most important feature and dimension of this Working Group is that we bring discussions about the most important elements impacting lives in the context of our contemporary global political economy. To bring our cutting edge research ideas and research into discussion with a wide range of scholars and practitioners, IPEG members run workshops and events, organise and participate in panels at BISA Conferences every year, publish work in our Discussion Papers series and get involved with this tremendously active research working group.
IPEG’s activities include:
- Member-led IPEG Workshops. These Workshops are proposed and run by IPEG and BISA members at their own institutions. Workshops are intended to promote areas of research that members are conducting and bring communities together for discussion on specific topics. IPEG has traditionally held an annual event as well which is intended to promote a range of areas of research with particular interest in promoting less dominant areas of research in IPE.
- 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
- Organising IPEG labelled BISA panels. Members propose panels for BISA conferences, organised around areas of research they choose. The list of last year’s BISA-IPEG panels is here.
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 more than 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.
There is a marked 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.
Connect with us!
You can join the IPEG jiscmail mailing list by going to the jiscmail website and clicking ‘subscribe/unsubscribe’. You can also view the jiscmail archives from 2010 via this link.
IPEG Book Prize
IPEG awards a book prize every year for a monograph published in the previous calendar year. Holly Snaith is the current Book Prize Chair. Find out more by reading the book prize mission statement.
IPEG Newsletters
IPEG puts together a newsletter each year as a record of activities undertaken by its members. The list of previous newsletters can be found here.