Description
SPERI Presents… “Towards a Political Economy of organised violence: war, technologies, labour, and (re)production”
Conveners: Elena Simon, University of Manchester; Frank Maracchione, University of Kent and SPERI - University of Sheffield
Chair: Remi Edwards, SPERI - Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, University of Sheffield
Participants:
Vicki Reif-Breitwieser, University of Sheffield, SPERI
Joanna Tidy, University of Sheffield
Elena Simon, University of Manchester
Frank Maracchione, University of Kent, SPERI
Beryl Pong, University of Cambridge
This roundtable discusses the Political Economy of violence committed by, between and within states. Critical Security and Military Studies and Feminist IPE have been at the forefront of researching war and violence, but often parallel rather than in conversation with each other (Stavrianakis and Stern 2018). While Feminist Political Economy research on war has highlighted gendered, militarised labour (Enloe 1983), the connections between welfare and warfare (Cowen 2005) and the violence against women (e.g True 2012), mainstream IPE has studied the political economy of liberal interventionism and conflicts, often drawing on historical examples (e.g. Coyne and Mather 2012). Critical Security studies studied technologies of power, and the privatisation of security (Abrahamsen and Leander 2016), reconceptualised (in)security and sought to understand how security labour is shaped by contemporary capitalism (Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2017). Recent moves in critical military studies investigated war’s materiality (e.g. Tidy 2015, Basham 2018) and how technologies of armed violence are applied to produce global order (Stavrianakis 2023). Both disciplines brought to the fore racial, gendered and colonial power relations in global war. Taken together, these contributions suggest that the production and maintenance of contemporary war and violence is rooted in capitalist economies and movements for non-violent futures are inherently situated in and shaped by the economies that make violence possible. So, what would a Political Economy of contemporary war and violence look like?
The roundtable will be recorded and will become an episode of the podcast series New Thinking in Political Economy, hosted by Dr Remi Edwards. The series is part of the SPERI Presents… podcast, produced by the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, taking on the big questions in political economy within and beyond the discipline. SPERI Presents... brings insights from foundational debates and brand-new research in the field to make sense of the social world around us by foregrounding the power relations of the global economy. We invite academics and practitioners to discuss contemporary capitalism, its ever-shifting dynamics, crises, and governance - and how this shapes our experience of everyday life.
