International Political Economy Working Group 2023 Book Prize winner announced
The IPEG Book Prize Committee is delighted to announce that the 2023 winner is Properties of Rent by Sushmita Pati (published by Cambridge University Press).
The four books chosen for the 2023 shortlist (published in 2022) speak to some of those most pressing issues in IPE: elite masculinities, illicit financial flows, sovereign indebtedness, and urbanisation.
Sushmita Pati’s Properties of Rent stands out for its theoretical sophistication and empirical richness. The book makes a key contribution to discussions of the “global city” through an in-depth study of landowning and rent in the Delhi’s urban villages. Drawing on detailed empirical research, Properties of Rent takes the reader on a journey into the localised practices of real estate in these peri-urban areas. As the book makes clear, the insecurity of the urban poor cannot simply be reduced to the totalizing forces of global capital. Instead, local (“vernacular”) economies, with their traditional practices of saving and investing, combine with the destructive forces of global capital accumulation to shape Delhi’s transformation into a global city. This complex but lucid account seamlessly integrates the micro-level, in all its smallness and granularity, with the big picture of global capitalism. It is also a highly intersectional account, one that is attentive to the role of class, caste, gender, ethnicity and religion in the making of the urban political economy.
The book committee would like to congratulate Sushmita Pati on this immensely important work.
BISA-IPEG 2023 Book Prize Committee Members
- Sandy Hager (Chair)
- Kate Bedford
- Florence Dafe
- Susanne Soederberg
- Ernesto Vivares
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