The Prize Committee is delighted to announce that the article by Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri titled “COVID-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regulatory state,” published in the journal, Review of International Political Economy has won the 2022 Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize.
The Committee in awarding the prize commends how the article was able to take stock of the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic and situate these within a longer history of state transformations and in relation to enduring issues regarding governance. It advances a novel framework of the neoliberal regulatory state to expose and explain contradictions in pandemic outcomes as arising from state failure. The Committee particularly noted that the article’s approach enabled the authors to look beyond surface explanations and uncover the deeper structural forces shaping state responses. By focusing on the pathologies of the regulatory state – the hollowing out of state capacity, the diffusion of responsibility and the reliance on ad hoc emergency measures – the authors are able to explain in painstaking detail how the ostensibly best-prepared states were found wanting when the pandemic hit, and unable to learn from these failures to change course. Using evidence from Britain and South Korea, the findings of this article will generate wider discussions regarding the role of the state and the political economy of crisis management.
The article is strongly written drawing on empirical evidence and substantive engagement with IPE literature. It represents work that skilfully combines theoretical sophistication with clear policy relevance. It should serve as an important contribution to the debates about the governance of the covid-19 pandemic, and the lessons that need to be learned to leave us better prepared for the next crisis.
For these reasons, the committee concludes that it is worthy of AIPEN’s recognition and we invite our broader community to read and debate the intellectual contributions of this piece.
Congratulations again to Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri!
The prize will be awarded at a future AIPEN workshop and Shahar Hameiri will be invited to write a PPE post on the winning article.
We look forward to receiving submissions for the 2023 prize next year!
Past awardees:
2021 Melissa Johnston, ‘Frontier Finance: The Role of Microfinance in Debt and Violence in Post-conflict Timor-Leste’, Review of International Political Economy, 27:6 (2020).
2020 Claire Parfitt, ‘ESG Integration Treats Ethics as Risk, but Whose Ethics and Whose Risk? Responsible Investment in the Context of Precarity and Risk-Shifting’, Critical Sociology, 46:4-5 (2020) [published Online First: 30 September 2019].
2019 Linda Weiss and Elizabeth Thurbon, “Power Paradox: How the Extension of US Infrastructural Power Abroad Diminishes State Capacity at Home.” Review of International Political Economy 25:6 (2018).
2018 Maria Tanyag, ‘Invisible Labor, Invisible Bodies: How the Global Political Economy Affects Reproductive Freedom in the Philippines’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 19:1 (2017).
2017 Samanthi J. Gunawardana, ‘“To Finish, We Must Finish”: Everyday Practices of Depletion in Sri Lankan Export-Processing Zones”, Globalizations, 13:6 (2016).
2016 Gareth Bryant, Siddhartha Dabhi and Steffen Böhm, ‘“Fixing” the Climate Crisis: Capital, States and Carbon Offsetting in India’, Environment and Planning A, 47:10 (2015).
2015 Ainsley Elbra, ‘Interests Need Not be Pursued If They Can [...]
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