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International Political Economy Working Group 2024 Book Prize winner announced

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The IPEG Book Prize Committee is delighted to announce that the 2024 winner has been selected as Melissa Johnston’s Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy (published by Oxford University Press).

Four books were selected for the shortlist which collectively demonstrate the diversity and vibrancy of IPE scholarship, covering peace building, the far right, the commodification of water, and offshore finance.

The committee found that Johnston’s fine-grained, ethnographic empirical work in East Timor was extremely impressive, which she employs to complicate and rethink dominant narratives around peacebuilding. The book engages with a wide range of important topics, such as microfinance, post-conflict reconstruction and domestic violence, all linked to the central topic of peacebuilding and the gendered inequalities that peacebuilding interventions are mediated through and all too often reinforce. It further highlights the need to recognise in the East Timorese context of kinship as an aspect of class and its interplay with gender. The book cuts across disciplines – IPE, development studies, peace studies – which chimes with the long tradition of eclecticism and inter-disciplinarity of British IPE.  

The committee also recognised Richard Saull’s two volume Capital, Race and Space (published by Brill) as Highly Commended. It represents an ambitious piece of scholarship, analysing the far right in the longue durée, from French Revolution to the present day. Speaking to multiple areas of IPE and other fields, the book contends that the liberal state has developed in tandem with, and has been at key times of crisis reliant upon, the far right. It employs in particular the concept of uneven and combined development (within a rich and sophisticated theoretical framework), which is used to explore the often overlooked importance of the international dimension in generating the far right. The book is fascinating, highly pertinent to the present day and convincingly argued.

We offer our heartfelt congratulations to both.

BISA-IPEG 2024 Book Prize Committee Members

  • Liam Campling
  • Alex Colas
  • Sushmita Pati
  • James Scott (Chair)
  • Nicola Smith
Find out more about the IPEG Working Group

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