Global Political Economy

Manchester has been central to global political economy debates since the mid-19th century, when both liberal free traders and Marx and Engels found a home here. They articulated some of the key ideas which our members still grapple with today.

About

The Global Political Economy cluster focuses research on a series of key questions regarding the dynamics of global capitalism. How does it depend on and reproduce key forms of inequality around race, gender, class and geography? What drives its crisis-prone qualities? What are the main ideological forms that sustain it and seem to make resistance to its power so difficult? How is it integral to the production of ecological unsustainability and can it survive the challenge of the climate crisis? What are the main current debates in the critique of global capitalism?

Colleagues and PhD students within the cluster work on a range of these questions in various specific contexts, including:

Gender, race and class in the global political economy
Trade, finance, and global production
The politics of global economic governance
Political economy of the environmental crisis and the pursuit of sustainability
Ideology and the legitimation of capitalism, especially neoliberalism
Resistance and social movements in the global economy
Political economy of various world regions, especially Europe, Africa, and Latin America

Highlights

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and ESRC-funded project Gendering Global Trade through Canada-UK Trade Relationships led by Adrienne Roberts and Silke Trommer; Roberts and Trommer also lead the SheTrades: Gendering Global Trade Governance project, funded by the SSHRC
Carl Death’s book The Green State in Africa won the 2018 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award from the Environmental Studies section of the International Studies Association
Mat Paterson was the recipient of the 2020 Distinguished Scholar Award from the Environmental Studies section of the International Studies Association
Mat Paterson is a Contributing Author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report
Sherilyn MacGregor has been funded to write a policy roadmap for a feminist green new deal for the UK by the Women’s Budget Group (2020-21) and a major research report on the impacts of climate change on care work by Oxfam USA (due to be published in 2021).
The project Foundations and Frontiers in IPE co-led by Stuart Shields and supported by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust
Greig Charnock is part of a research consortium for the Co-working Spaces and the Uban Ecosystem Post-COVID-19 project. He is also a Co-investigator for the Canadian SSHRC project 'Smart cities in international comparison'.
Georgina Waylen continues to publish work from her large European Research Council Advanced Grant project Understanding Institutional Change: A Gender Perspective

People

Academic staff

Ali Bhagat (Political Economy, Race, Migration, Sexuality, Global South, Neoliberalism, Housing)
Ian Bruff (Critical political economy, European political economy, neoliberalism, critical social theory, capitalist diversity) - Convenor from semester 2020-2023
Greig Charnock (Contemporary global capitalism, crisis and austerity in Europe, critical theory (Marxism), theories of the production of space)
Carl Death (African politics, development studies, environmental politics, protest and resistance)
Sherilyn MacGregor (Environmental politics; feminist/gender politics; urban sustainability; social movements; citizenship and participation)
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú (Inter-generational migration studies, identity and belonging, postcolonial/decolonial studies, aesthetics and the sensory, voice and resistance as music/language)
Matthew Paterson (Climate change politics, environmental political economy, cultural political economy, social network analysis)
Jasmin Ramovic (Peacebuilding, international political economy, ethnography in peace studies, everyday peace, social movements)
Adrienne Roberts (International political economy, feminist political economy, gender, social reproduction, debt)
Stuart Shields (International political economy, Eastern Europe, regional development banks, Gramsci, populism)
Silke Trommer (International political economy, international trade, development, social movements, gender and IPE)
Robert Watt (International political economy, environmental politics, climate change, development studies)
Georgina Waylen (Gender and politics, comparative politics, feminist institutionalism, international political economy)

Postgraduate Researchers

Joshua Barritt, ‘EU Foreign Policy Approaches to Environmental Security in Sub-Saharan Africa’. Supervised by Carl Death and Paul Tobin.
Andrew Eggleston, ‘The Limits to Housing Policy in the UK’. Supervised by Greig Charnock and Adrienne Roberts.
Jake Flavell, ‘Philanthrocapitalism, Development and "Chuggers": Contradiction, Antagonism and Ideology in Oxfam and Farm Africa's Development Solution’. Supervised by Carl Death and Japhy Wilson.
Franco Galdini, ‘The post-Soviet space and Uzbekistan in the international division of labour: from transition to capital accumulation’. Supervised by Yoram Gorlizki and Stuart Shields.
Konstantinos Kanellopoulos, ‘The Greek “great depression” vs. the modern “Greek Odyssey”: drawing lessons from history via the lens of political economy’. Supervised by Dimitris Papadimitriou and Stuart Shields.
Anna-Maria Köhnke, ‘Establishing a “work index” of wellbeing: an investigation into working conditions as a fundamental welfare indicator’. Supervised by Sherilyn MacGregor and John O’Neill.
Aliki Koutlou, ‘Debt beyond credit: exploring the rise and impact of utility arrears in Greece under austerity’. Supervised by Ian Bruff and Adrienne Roberts.
Julija Loginovic, ‘The individualisation discourse in global neoliberal governance and its role in subjectivity production: the case of the World Development Report’. Supervised by Carl Death and Stuart Shields.
Aino Ursula Mäki, ‘On the biopolitics of primitive accumulation: housewifisation in the global political economy’. Supervised by Sherilyn MacGregor and Adrienne Roberts.
Davide Monaco, ‘The neoliberalisation process in Italy after the 2011 sovereign debt crisis: social forces, consensus and common sense’. Supervised by Ian Bruff and Dimitris Papadimitriou.
Magdalena Rodekirchen, ‘Towards an intersectional analysis of human-nature relations in feminist political ecology: bridging the divide between the post-colonial and the posthuman’. Supervised by Sherilyn MacGregor and Mat Paterson.
Konrad Sobczyk, ‘The mediation of EU competitiveness and trade policy in the comparative political economy of Sweden and Greece and its implications for exports of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises’. Supervised by Dimitris Papadimitriou and Silke Trommer.
Charlotte Weatherill, ‘Vulnerability and resistance: a discourse analysis of global climate change politics’. Supervised by Carl Death and Mat Paterson.

Associates and Alumni

Joanna Flavell, 2017-21. From gender blind to gender bind: political strategies of the women and gender constituency in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Mario Hernandez Trejo, 2017-21. Payments for ecosystem services and the reproduction of capitalism in a Mexican rural landscape.
Lewis Bassett-Yerrell, 2016-20. Corbynism and democracy: a political movement in and against neoliberalism.
Esra Nartok, 2016-20. The relationship between religion and politics under neoliberalism in India and Turkey - a Gramscian perspective. Now a Lecturer at Karadeniz Technical University, Turkey.
Mertcan Öztürk, 2016-2019. ‘Distinction versus recognition: making sense of the Tophane incidents in the context of gentrification’. Now a Lecturer in Politics at Giresse University, Turkey.
Will Harvey. 2016-2019. Global Transformations and the British Working Class, 1997-2010. Now Policy Analyst, House of Lords, UK Parliament.
Kai Heron, 2015-2019. “Many Struggles, One Fight:” Deleuze|Guattari, Lacan, and the US Anti-Fracking Movement.
Christian Scholz, 2016-19. The Politics of Competitiveness Adjustment of the Euro-Area. A Critical Policy Analysis of European Integration in Times of Crisis. Currently teaching at the Berlin School of Economics and Law.
Muhammad Rakhmat. 2015-18. Examining the implications of the Belt Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Now a lecturer at the University of Indonesia.
Malgorzata Jakimow, NGOs, labour and space: migrant workers and the remaking of citizenship in China, 2013-2015. Now Assistant Professor in East Asian Politics at Durham University.
Gediminas Lesutis, 2015-18. The Politics of Precarity and Global Capitalist Expansion: The Case of Mining, Dispossession and Suffering in Tete, Mozambique. Now a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.
Anna Wienhues, 2015-18. Life in Common: Distributive Ecological Justice on a Shared Earth. Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Zürich.
Simon Chin-Yee, 2015-18. Defining Policy: Drivers of Climate Change Policy in Kenya. Now Research Associate, Kings College London.
Kelvin Charles, 2014-17. The Common in Hardt and Negri. Commercial Operations Manager (non-academic).
Jon Las Heras, 2014-17. Variegated Trade Union Strategies in the Spanish Automotive Industry. Lecturer in Industrial Economics, Universidad del País Vasco.
Martín Arboleda, 2012-15. Resource Extraction and the Extension of the Urban Form. Lecturer in Sociology, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile.
Giulia Sirigu, 2012-15. Continuity and Change in Mexican Foreign Policy under Fox. Representative, Italian Chamber of Commerce.
Ilias Alami, 2015-18. Post-crisis capital account policies in emerging capitalisms: regaining policy space? A comparison between Brazil and South Africa. Now postdoctoral fellow for at Maastricht University, on ERC-funded SWFsEurope project.
Caroline Metz, 2015-18. Why is the European Union relaunching asset-securitisation? The politics of capital markets union and financial disintermediation. Now postdoctoral research associate at SPERI, Sheffield University.
Laura White, 2010-15. Executive leadership in an international organisation: a case study of WTO Directors-General (1995-2013). Now International Trade Specialist at the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service.
Nadim Mirshak, 2013-16. Education as resistance? Political education, civil society and the prospects of democratization in Egypt. Now Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester.

Political Economy Centre

The Centre seeks to recapture and promote the idea of political economy as a concrete field of academic study.

Sustainable Consumption Institute

The SCI aims to bring insight and clarity to a key aspect of the sustainability challenge: the role of consumption.