2018 IPEG Book Prize Winner

The IPEG Book Prize Committee are pleased to announce the 2018 Book Prize Winner:

Grabel, Ilene (2017) When Things Don't Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence, MIT Press.

Among the inspiring list of books that show how IPE is pushing the boundaries of knowledge about global political economic phenomenon, the Selecting Committee for the IPEG Book Prize is absolutely delighted to announce the 2018 IPEG Book Prize winner is Ilene Grabel, Professor of International Finance at Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver.

Prof Grabel book When Things Don’t Fall Apart shows she is a leading critical thinker on the global financial system that can challenge dominant views making significant contributions to our understanding.

Departing from the idea that the global financial crisis had little effect on global financial governance and developmental finance, she argues that the crisis induced inconsistent and ad hoc discontinuities in global financial governance and developmental finance that are now having profound effects on emerging market and developing economies. Moreover, she claims the resulting incoherence in global financial governance is productive rather than debilitating.

The book substantiates Prof Grabel claims with empirically rich case studies that explore the effects of recent crises on networks of financial governance (such as the G-20); transformations within the IMF; institutional innovations in liquidity support and project finance from the national to the transregional levels; and the “rebranding” of capital controls. Grabel concludes with a careful examination of the opportunities and risks associated with the evolutionary transformations underway.

She will be opening the IPEG Annual Conference “IPE for the Next Century: setting an interdisciplinary research agenda” with a Lecture on Thursday 2 May 2019. Register Here 

Some of the comments of the judges:

The strongest element of Grabel’s thesis is of financial instability itself being captured by capital as value. This ‘productivity of incoherence’ argument allows us to understand the forces of capital (or indeed its opposition) as dialectical (rather than linear). The book is an enjoyable read that explains the economic world as both complex and unwieldy while undergirded by unitary logics

An excellent example of showing readers what you mean, not just telling readers what you mean

Pays attention to the IFIs in terms of not just rhetoric, but also policy and process. What the IFIs say, what they do and how they go about doing it, all three dimensions are captured in quite amazing detail in this one text

Contains some very relevant and novel empirical information about the global institutions and governance revolving around financial markets since the eruption of the 2007/8 crisis

A reminder, of the strong shortlist of other highly interesting and important contributions: 

Hesketh, Chris (2017) Spaces of Capital/Spaces of Resistance: Mexico and the Global Political Economy, University of Georgia Press
Selwyn, Benjamin (2017) The struggle for development, Polity
Wylde, Christopher (2017) Emerging Markets and the State, Palgrave Macmillan, London
Cahill, Damien and Konings, Martijn (2017) Neoliberalism, Polity


We would like to thank the committee, Akosua Keseboa Darkwah, Angela Wigger, Alex Nunn and Ashok Kumar for their hard work over the summer in reading and ranking these books. We very much hope they will be happy to be part of the committee for one more year.