ÌÇÐÄTV

Speakers: (University of Amsterdam), (University of Sussex), (University of ÌÇÐÄTV)

Chair: (University of ÌÇÐÄTV)

For 2017 the ÌÇÐÄTV IPE debate took up the topic of economic accounting. Specifically speakers were asked to discuss the politics of current, widespread practices of measuring and quantifying what matters in the world, but from three differing IPE perspectives: economic, feminist, and environmental.

The degree to which we tend to quantify our economic, political and social lives is now quite staggering. Quantification and measurement are highly important tools used to inform decision making within inter-governmental organisations (IGOs), national and sub-national governance bodies, and parts of civil society. The most common example is gross domestic product (GDP), which is used as the primary indicator of national politico-economic success. Although numbers may seem, on the surface, to be objective simplifications, measuring life in this way is deeply political and has a dark underbelly.

This was a lively debate, attended by students and scholars from the University of ÌÇÐÄTV, as well as some scholars visiting from other universities. All three speakers pointed to the inability of statistics, assembled as they currently are, to ‘see’ a wide variety of aspects of life thereby rendering these aspects ‘invisible’ in governance terms. This, in turn, has various political implications not least in terms of: the de facto downgrading of that which is not visible, distributive effects, and the obfuscation and reification of the power relations that sit behind decisions about what to measure and how. Another observation made was that a great many attempts to quantify are inaccurate, or change depending upon ‘who’ is doing the counting. Despite these critical observations, there was some suggestion of using numbers to challenge the status quo, as well as some questions about how to move towards different mechanisms of measuring what does and does not work.

You can watch the 2017 Annual ÌÇÐÄTV Debate on the Future of IPE below:

Dr. , has been invited by the Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, USA, to give a lecture. The talk is titled "Taking Pierre Nora to the Bombsite: Memory, Death and Capital."

Pierre Nora has argued that: ‘we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’. For Nora, industrialisation and capitalist acceleration were the destroyers of traditional societal structures. Memory industries emerged as methods by which societies could then imagine continuity and identity in response to social dislocation. This talk takes Pierre Nora, and other scholars of memory’s political economy, to the terrorist bombsite. Building upon their historical sociologies of memorialisation, and using her fieldwork from the reconstruction efforts which followed the 9/11 attacks and European bombings, I explore the sublimation of the memorial (and the dead human) to economic agendas and broader rationales of ‘regeneration’ and urban renewal. In post-terrorist reconstruction, the human subject is profoundly displaced by governance which triages economic injury and blight. Economy thereby emerges as the terrain upon which counterterrorism is fought.

The lecture takes place on Thursday April 6th, for more information, please see:

Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac have worked with Channel 4 to produce a 2-part documentary on how British spies targeted Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. New evidence reveals the extent of the surveillance, who ordered it, and the unique insights it provided into Downing Street's response to a constitutional crisis. The first programme will be show on Sunday at 8pm and the second programme will be shown the following week.

Maria Koinova has written a piece, titled 'Why Erdoğan is chasing Turkey’s overseas voters so hard,' for The Conversation.

The article can be read here:

Juanita Elias and Shirin Rai have published a piece in The Conversation that considers how the £2 bn made available in the Spring budget for adult social care might be spent.

Read the article here:

This article draws upon research conducted by the PSA Commission on Care which reported in November 2016. Full details of the Commisions work can be found at