Nominations open for the International Political Economy Working Group Book Prize 2023

The International Political Economy Group (IPEG) awards a book prize every year for a monograph published in the previous calendar year. The prize is the defining award in IPE, and carries substantial prestige and profile well beyond the UK. IPEG especially welcomes nominations from minoritised academics in such terms as gender, sexuality, race, disability, and seniority.

IPEG is one of the largest and most active working groups in BISA, with membership drawn from across the globe. As such is a very prominent part of international studies research and a highly significant forum for IPE scholars both in the UK and internationally.

The process

The process for judging the competition this year will be as follows:

• Nominations will be solicited from the IPEG community in the usual open and democratic way via this Google Form. Please only nominate one book (i.e. the one that you consider to be the very best published in 2022). When doing so, please offer a short explanation (up to 300 words) of why it is worthy of the prize. It is crucial that members do this: the more you can explain to the committee why this is the best book published in IPE over the past year, the more that will help with the shortlisting process. Make your nomination now.

• There are four conditions that need to be fulfilled when nominating: (i) the book must have been published in the previous calendar year (in this case, 2022); (ii) the book cannot be an edited volume; (iii) only one book can be nominated; (iv) the person nominating the book should be a member of BISA and IPEG. We would like to remind IPEG members of the importance of renewing their BISA membership and showing support for your professional association, particularly in a time of crisis. For the membership renewal pages, see: https://www.bisa.ac.uk/become-a-member. To subscribe to the BISA-IPEG mailing list, please visit: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=BISA-IPEG. The deadline for book prize nominations: Friday 30 June 2023 at 1700 BST.

• In late-July, an extended committee comprising both the members of the book prize voting panel and the remaining members of the IPEG convenorship (none of whom will cast a vote in the initial nomination process) will create a shortlist based on a detailed analysis of the longlist. Given that no individual IPEG member can ever read more than a small sample of work published across the breadth of the field in a given year – and, by definition, their single nomination is their view of the best book from the sample of those they have read – the convenorship consider that this process represents the fairest way to balance popularity with equity and inclusivity.

• Over the summer, the book prize committee will read the shortlisted books and announce the winner in Autumn in advance of the IPEG conference, where the winner is invited to give the keynote the following year.

The criteria guiding the verdicts and votes of the Book Prize judges include: conceptual innovations; empirical analysis; contribution to IPE as a discipline; contribution/connection to broader social science literatures; clarity of exposition; quality of argument. Of course, such criteria will not apply to all books in the same way, and in this sense they represent more a guide than a template. Nevertheless, it is intended to facilitate the judges’ votes and deliberations.

This process combines membership participation and committee judgments on the book’s quality. The monographs of previous winners have enjoyed considerable esteem. As such, the IPEG Book Prize has become a notable event and mark of status within and beyond IPE.

NB: Your email address is requested solely to ensure fairness in the one-member, one-vote, voting process and to help us check the consistency of the IPEG membership database. Only the Chair will see this information and it will be immediately separated from the anonymised nominations that are presented to the shortlisting panel. Feel free to drop the convenors an email if your details need updating: ipeg.group@bisa.ac.uk.

Past awardees

2022 – Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás, Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World (Verso, 2021)

2021 – Susanne Soederberg, Urban Displacements: Governing Surplus and Survival in Global Capitalism (Routledge, 2020)

2020 – Kate Bedford, Bingo Capitalism: The Law and Political Economy of Everyday Gambling (OUP, 2019)

2019 – Adam Hanieh, Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (CUP, 2018)

2018 – Ilene Grabel, When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Development Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence (MIT Press, 2017)

2017 – Cornel Ban, Ruling Ideas: How Global Neoliberalism Goes Local (OUP, 2016)

2016 – Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto, 2015)

2015 – Susanne Soederberg, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population (Routledge, 2014)

2014 – Samuel Knafo, The Making of Modern Finance: Liberal Governance and the Gold Standard (Routledge, 2013)

2013 – Jacqui True, The Political Economy of Violence Against Women (Oxford University Press, 2012)

2012 – Adam David Morton, Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011)

2011 – Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford University Press, 2010)

2010 – Penny Griffin, Gendering the World Bank: Neoliberalism and the Gendered Foundations of Global Governance (Palgrave, 2009)

2009 – William Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)

2008 – Matthew Paterson, Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

2007 – Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (MIT Press, 2006)

2006 – Graham Harrison, The World Bank and Africa: The Construction of Governance States (Routledge, 2004)

Photo by Sara Cohen on Unsplash