Accounting for Crisis: Challenging the Theory and Practice of Global
Political Economy
Roundtable 1: Crisis of capitalism and nature
There are many, often interlocking, dimensions to the current crisis in global capitalism.
This first panel seeks to elucidate and analyse the origins and manifestations produced
by the crisis as well as the contradictions it gives rise to or intensifies. The dimensions of
the crisis which might frame this discussion include: the financial and Eurozone crises
and what these imply for projects of regional market integration; questions of the social
sustainability and resistance to the current politics of austerity and their associated
projects of re-structuring state-economy-society complexes; and issues of the ecological
(un) sustainability of the organisation of the contemporary global economy, apparent in
inter-linked crises around questions of access and distribution of food, energy and water,
despite rhetoric around the creation of a green economy or a ‘green new deal’.
Roundtable 2: Crisis of political forms and ideologies
The second panel explores the question of what current forms of crisis imply for political
forms (of state, market and civil society) and the alignments and balance of power
between social forces such as capital and labour. Are there implications for modes of
regulation, production or foreign relations? What do these changes imply for the
coherence, resilience and power of ideologies of capitalism, development and growth?
What discursive and ideological shifts are taking place among the transnational capitalist
class to accommodate challenges to the prevailing order in the wake of the crisis and
how likely are they to succeed? Beyond political and economic ideologies, the events of
the Arab Spring and challenges to orientalism provide scope for optimism about the
prospects of change in the international order, even as political Islam and the ‘rising
powers’ such as China, India, Russia and Brazil are identified as threats to western
supremacy.
Roundtable 3: Crisis of academic discipline
The final panel addresses the question of what these developments imply for us as
scholars, activists and practitioners. Are conventional approaches in Politics, Political
Economy and International Relations fit for purpose in accounting for crisis? If not, why
not, and what alternative perspectives need to be brought to bear? Recent debates have
raised the issue of whether we have reached the ‘end of IR theory?’ Is this intellectual
crisis exaggerated or misdiagnosed? Does the current crisis accelerate that decline? What
innovative (or old!) forms of theorising, perhaps across disciplines, might be required?
Which novel approaches to engaged academic enquiry might be necessary to effectively
engage in the analysis and articulation of responses to the crisis?