Ban’s Ruling Ideas Wins 2017 IPEG Book Prize
Cornel Ban, Assistant Professor of International Relations and Co-Director of the Global Economic Governance Initiative, has been named the winner of 2017 International Political Economy Group Book Prize for his latest book Ruling Ideas: How Global Neoliberalism Goes Local.
IPEG awards a book prize every year for a monograph published in the previous calendar year. The prize is the defining award in IPE, and as such carries enormous prestige and profile. The criteria guiding the verdicts and votes of the Book Prize judges include: conceptual innovations; empirical analysis; contribution to IPE as a discipline; contribution/connection to broader social science literatures; clarity of exposition; and quality of the argument.
Comments on Ruling Ideas from the IPEG Book Prize Committee:
“Makes a genuine contribution to IPE scholarship and debate on the often ambiguous concept of neo-liberalism.”
“Provides rich empirical detail on the dominant treatments of ruling economic ideas and how these are translated into practical policy action.”
“Serious long-running investigation into the case studies that provided truly novel empirical findings.”
Ruling Ideas challenges conventional explanations of the global diffusion of neoliberalism and emphasizes the agency of local translators. Ban theorizes and empirically tests for the first time the mechanisms that make neoliberal ideas become more radicalized in some countries and more moderate in others and examines how neoliberal hybrids survive crises.
The book covers the Franco period in Spain and the Ceausescu period in Romania, discusses the economic integration of these countries into the EU and continues through Europe’s Great Recession and the European debt crisis. The broad historical coverage enables a careful analysis of how neoliberalism rules in times of stability and crisis and under different political systems.
Cornel Ban is the author of ten peer-reviewed articles on economic policy strategies in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and Latin America, professionals and economic policy, the politics of IMF fiscal policy advice and European financial crisis management. His most recent book was published by Oxford University Press and deals with the local adaptation and crisis resilience of global economic paradigms in Spain and Romania.