[CFP] Conference 2022 – Political Economy and Law Working Group

The 12th Annual IIPPE Conference
Socio-Ecological Crisis and the Political Economy of Sustainability 
7 – 9 September 2022, Bologna, Italy

Political Economy and Law Working Group

Law plays an integral role in the configuration of variegated and actually existing manifestations of capitalist processes across the globe, such as those associated with socio-ecological crises, rising precarities and inequalities, the governance of debt, austerity, financialization, technology and others. With this inaugural call for papers for the new IIPPE Working Group on Political Economy and Law, we invite submissions to this year’s IIPPE conference that focus on the intertwinement of political economy and law, to consider the following overarching question, particularly as it pertains to socio-ecological crisis and transformation: What is the law and how does it shape – and being shaped by – capitalist processes and relations?

This call aims to provide a space within the IIPPE conference for both theoretical and empirical papers on all aspects of the interaction between law and political economy, across all sectors and geographical contexts. We are particularly interested in papers pertinent to this year’s conference theme on Socio-Ecological Crisis and the Political Economy of Sustainability. We also want to encourage submissions that move beyond US/western European-centric law and political economy to consider Political Economy and Law in Indigenous, Global South and non-western contexts.

We seek to combine perspectives from (but not limited to) critical political economy, critical legal studies, law and society, the anthropology of law, institutional economics, Marxist legal theory, cultural studies and other pertinent fields and traditions.

The deadline for proposals’ submission is 30 April 2022.

We invite presentations on the following topics:

• Law, markets and capitalism: The constitutive role of law in establishing, expanding and reproducing markets and market relations. The legal underpinnings of capitalism and processes of capital accumulation, particularly as they relate to socio-ecological crisis and transformation. 

• Law, power and inequality: How are class, race, gender, environmental and other inequalities and power relations embedded and reproduced in legal structures and processes, policies and modes of governance? Intersectional struggles in (and around) law.

• Law, environmental justice and climate change: How do big corporations intercept environmental and other law for natural resource extractivism, with what impacts for climate change, and localised natural resources dispossessions? Law/international law and climate change dispossession.

• Law, money and financialization: Debt relations and the debtfare state, legal apparatuses of debt and the processes related to asset-backed securitization, secondary markets, bankruptcy and others. Law and the financialization of climate change and its mitigation.

• Resistance and contestation of legal regimes and policy reforms: How do different communities understand and fight for (environmental and other kinds of) justice? How are policies and legal regimes contested across local, national and international contexts?

• Property rights and property relations in urban and rural contexts: Law and processes of urbanization, (re)development and displacement in the city and peri-urban spaces. Agrarian reforms, access to land, food sovereignty and farmers struggles. Law, intellectual property and access to knowledge.

• Neoliberalism, law and the state: The changing and variegated role of law and the state in processes of neoliberalization, actually existing austerity, the marketisation and privatisation of social and economic rights, such as healthcare, housing, food, water and education.

• Imagining post-capitalist futures and the political economy of sustainability: Policies and legal reforms for a post-capitalist, socio-ecological transition and the commons.

• Law and political economy in Indigenous, Global South and non-western contexts – moving beyond US/western European-centric law and political economy. Decolonisation of law and political economy.

• Teaching and research in political economy and law: Methodological issues, pluralism and curriculum development.

Submissions may be made as: (a) proposals for individual papers (which IIPPE will group into panels), (b) proposals for panels or streams of panels, (c) proposals on activism.

To submit a proposal, please go to the following link, and carefully follow the instructions there: https://whova.com/portal/registration/iippe_202209/

IMPORTANT: Please indicate Political Economy and Law when you complete the electronic form.

New participants committed to political economy, interdisciplinarity, history of economic thought, pluralism in economic and social thinking, and/or their application to policy analysis and activism are strongly encouraged to submit an abstract.

For information on this call or the Political Economy and Law WG, please email the WG co-ordinators, or visit: http://iippe.org/political-economy-and-law-working-group/

Christina Sakali christina.sakali@gmail.com

Mnqobi Ngubane ngubanemnqobi@gmail.com

Angela Daly angelacdaly@gmail.com

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