Political Economy Beyond Boundaries is a Standing Section at European International Studies Association’s annual Pan-European Conference on International Relations (PEC). The section was established by Cemal Burak Tansel and Lisa Tilley in 2020 and convenes a large number of individual sessions under its umbrella every year.

The section aims to develop a sustained research network of scholars working in and beyond International Studies to promote critical research on the global political economy. Grounded in growing calls to diversify the disciplinary focus of (International) Political Economy, the section offers a home for scholars to study contemporary capitalism and its gendered and racialised operation at the global, local and household levels. The section aims to advance an explicitly “global” outlook for political economy research and provide concrete roadmaps to overcome the pitfalls of Eurocentric knowledge production in (International) Political Economy. To this end, the section prioritises and promotes knowledge produced in and for the global South. Section chairs are keen to utilise this platform as a vehicle to design meaningful collaborations between scholars in the global South and North.

PEBB works towards a genuinely global political economy by encouraging contributions from Global South scholars and those working from more marginalised sites in the global economy. Beyond this, we encourage a shift in focus to those geographical sites and locations, which are vital to and formative of the current political economic and ecological moment, such as the plantation, the mine, the household.

PEBB adopts a radical and pluralist vision of political economy and welcomes contributions from scholars working in/across the social sciences and humanities. We primarily aim to provide a platform at PECs to analyse the following topics, but are more than happy to accept proposals that engage with other relevant themes:

  • Racial capitalism
  • Climate breakdown (extraction, dispossession, climate justice)
  • Production and reproduction
  • Democracy, emancipation, and political and socio-economic alternatives
  • Global agriculture, agroecology and food sovereignty
  • Contemporary theoretical debates in political economy with a focus on perspectives from the global South
  • Mentoring/career development sessions for doctoral researchers/ECRs and scholars from the global South

We believe that it is vital to mobilise scholars working on the recovery and development of radical analytical frameworks and concepts, including racial capitalism, extractivism, abolition political economy, and genuinely intersectional feminist political economy. Our section provides space for scholars working on the pressing problems of the day in which environmental harm, race, gender, and sexuality are all linked through political–economic processes. We aim to create a space which centres global South theorists of political economy, rather than reproducing the global South as a space to which European theory is applied.

Equity and Access

PEBB explicitly works towards providing a platform and community for marginalised scholars and scholarship in political economy and beyond. Yet the same axes of inequality that shape the global economy also affect many scholars' ability to be present at events such as PECs. Material limits such as borders and financial burdens create barriers for the very scholars that we would like to work with under this section’s umbrella.

In order to address these inequities, we encourage our participants to take advantage of two remedial, albeit still limited, measures:

  1. EISA is offering generous mobility grants to PEC participants. Doctoral researchers and ECRs are prioritised in the allocation of funds. The fund also uses a quota system to ensure that participants from the global South receive a certain number of grants each year. At a time when diversity and inclusion efforts in the academia are often reduced to the level of symbolic gestures, the EISA mobility fund offers meaningful material support to scholars who face structural inequalities. Accordingly, we strongly encourage our participants—especially those who are doctoral researchers, ECRs, precarious academics and working in the global South—to apply to this scheme.
  2. Given the negative environmental impact of air travel, as well as the above-mentioned administrative and financial barriers that exclude many scholars from attending PECs, we are happy for our participants to present their work remotely via videoconferencing tools. Please note that our ability to host scholars remotely will be contingent on host institutions' infrastructure.

Panel Composition

Panels submitted for consideration should reflect the contributions to the field of political economy by intellectuals with protected characteristics as far as possible.