Call for papers: Things fall apart? Towards an anticipatory international political economy in an age of global disorder

International Political Economy Working Group workshop 2026

15-16 October 2026, University of Manchester

In the context of intensified militarism and warfare, climate breakdown, and geopolitical, economic, and ideological fragmentation, the global political economy is undergoing profound and rapid transformation. These trends are already reshaping the field’s agenda: economic statecraft and the turning of economic interdependence into a tool of coercion; the return of industrial policy and the developmental state; transitions in energy and critical minerals that bind climate, geoeconomics and financial subordination together; the rise of AI and platforms as infrastructures of accumulation and control; and the contours of an emerging order that no longer corresponds to common understandings of ‘liberal’. These shifts play out inconsistently, shaped by longer-standing processes of uneven development, intersectional hierarchies, and the afterlives of empire and colonialism. They also raise far-reaching questions about the power and role of capital and labour, states, international institutions, civil society, and activist groups (on the left and the right) in this new global order. 

Traditionally, IPE has tended to be most confident when looking backward: we explain crises once they have happened, theorise transformations once they have settled, and trace the structures that work to shape outcomes we already know. But the disorder that is emerging asks for more than retrospective sense-making. Students, policymakers, activists, and the sheer pace of change in the global economy are pressing IPE to reflect on what might come next. This workshop, therefore, asks not only how IPE makes sense of global disorder, but whether it can anticipate it - treating the future as a problem for scholarship rather than a crisis to be survived. We take anticipation to mean two things: the critical task of anticipating in order to contest and transform, and the problem-solving task of foresight for those who must govern. 

We invite contributions along four lines. 

• On theory and knowledge: what new concepts do we need in order to understand dynamics that are still playing out, and what is the role of IPE knowledge(s) and the academy in forging alternatives to disorder? 
• On practice: how do we teach anticipatory reasoning, advise those who must act before the evidence is complete, and use IPE scholarship to centralise stories, practices, and modes of resistance and solidarity? 
• On method: are our existing approaches - qualitative, quantitative, mixed - adequate to understanding challenges still taking shape, and can the field’s transatlantic and global traditions be made to work together rather than against one another 
• On location: which spatial and geographical locales have been traditionally included or excluded in our understanding of IPE and to what effect? How might we move towards an IPE that is more attentive to sites and scales such as the household, the body, the informal economy, the Global South, and the everyday? 

The 2026 workshop of the International Political Economy Working Group at the University of Manchester invites scholars of IPE to reflect on these themes and provocations. IPEG welcomes contributions from scholars, students, activists, and policy practitioners, either in the form of fully formed papers or work-in-progress presentations.   

Please submit your abstracts of no more than 200 words through our online form [forms.cloud.microsoft]. The deadline for submissions is 15 August 2026. IPEG also welcomes panel proposals. If you wish to host a panel with 3-4 presentations, please send us the title of the panel, the theme of the panel, and an abstract of each of the presentations using this online form [forms.cloud.microsoft]. The deadline for panel proposals is also 15 August. We will send out the notification of acceptance by 1 September. This year, the event will be hosted by the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester on 15 and 16 October. 

Registration is free for BISA members. There are a limited number of bursaries available through BISA-IPEG to cover the costs of attending for BISA members who are PhD students and ECRs without institutional support.

There are also a limited number of bursaries available through the Manchester Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence (MJMCE) to cover the costs of attending for students from MJMCE’s research partners, the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, and the University of Liverpool.

Colleagues interested in applying for these bursaries are encouraged to submit an abstract to the workshop, with further details of how to apply to follow in due course.

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash