Dr Stuart Shields

Stuart Shields is interested in historical materialist approaches to international relations/international political economy and particularly in the Amsterdam School fractions of capital perspective.
Stuart completed his PhD on the transnational dimension of regime transformation in Eastern Central Europe at Aberystwyth's Department of International Politics, in February 2002, and joined Manchester in 2003.

Stuart was founding secretary of the Critical Political Economy Research Network of the European Sociological Association until September 2007, and is the current convenor of the BISA International Political Economy working group.  He is co-convenor of the University of Manchester Historical Materialism Research Group, and together with Werner Bonefeld, Hugo Radice, and Greig Charnock set up the CSE Trans-Pennine Working Group.  He is a member of the Global Competitiveness Research Group based at the Institute for Global Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University. 

Stuart has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, and the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

International Political Economy, Eastern Europe and post-communist transition, EU enlargement, Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, neoliberalism, globalisation.  

Stuart's current work is focused on four main projects

• A comparative political economy of regional development banks.
• Populist resistance to the promotion of global competitiveness in Eastern Europe.
• The political economy of the wine sector in Eastern Europe.
• The spatial political economy of global governance with Huw Macartney

In recent years my teaching has focused on the following areas

Undergraduate:

• POLI10601 Introduction to International Politics
• POLI20511 The Politics of Globalization
• POLI30722 International Political Economy

Postgraduate:

• POLI70311 Critical Approaches to International Political Economy
• POLI71052 Post Communist Transitions

Publications Database

Authored book

• (Forthcoming 2009) 'The international political economy of transition: Transnational social forces and Eastern Central Europe's transformation, London: Routledge/RIPE Studies in Global Political Economy.

Refereed journal articles

• (2008) 'How the East was won: Globalisation, transnational social forces and Poland's transition to a market economy' Global Society, Vol. 22 No. 4.  
• (2007) 'From socialist Solidarity to neo-populist neoliberalisation? The paradoxes of Poland's post-communist transition', Capital & Class, Issue 93, Autumn, pp. 101-121.
• (2007) 'Double the Shock, with half the Therapy: Transnational capital, class configuration and the social implications of Poland's ongoing transition to a market economy', Competition and Change, Vol. 11 No. 4 pp. 153-176. 
• (2006) 'Historicizing transition: the Polish political economy in a period of global structural change – Eastern Central Europe's passive revolution?' International Politics, Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 474-499.
• (2004) 'Global restructuring and the Polish state: Transition, transformation, or transnationalisation?' Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 132-54.
• (2003) 'The charge of the “Right Brigade”: Transnational social forces and Poland's neoliberal transition', New Political Economy, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 225-44. 

PhD supervision:

I am happy to supervise PhD students interested in IPE, Eastern Europe, EU enlargement, globalisation, and any of the areas listed above in my research interests.  If you'd like to discuss research proposals please email me.

Current PhD students:

• Jaqueline Gomez Mendez, The Argentinean and Uruguayan political economy decomposition of 2001 and 2005.
• George Kyris, Europeanisation, EU Enlargement and the future of the Turkish-Cypriot community
• Tomas Maltby, An investigation into the impact of the Visegrad Group members on EU foreign policy since the 2004 enlargement.
• Simon Orth, Promoting 'Normative Power Europe': a critical assessment of the European Union's externalisation of Justice and Home Affairs between Macedonia, Morocco & Ukraine.
  

Recently completed PhD students

• Huw Macartney (ESRC funded) The Single Securities Market: A Transnational Financial Elite Project. Huw began his PhD in 2003 funded by the ESRC.  He is currently an ESRC post-doctoral fellow (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/politics/School/StaffAZ.php?id=ODA5MTc4&page_var=personal) at Nottingham University, and commences a three year Hallsworth Fellowship in Manchester in 2009.
• Denis Murphy (2008) Critical realism and Marxist state debate.
• Khaulath Didi Mohammed (2008) Globalization and democratization: The case of the Maldives.