The 2008 Warwick RIPE Debate: ‘American’ versus ‘British’ IPE

On Monday May 12th 2008 the Department of Politics and International Studies hosted the first of what will become the annual Warwick RIPE Debates. It took place in front of an audience in excess of one hundred, comprised of staff and graduate students from around fifteen different institutions. The 2008 debate featured Professor Benjamin Cohen of the University of California, Santa Barbara, talking about his new book, International Political Economy: An Intellectual History (Princeton University Press, 2008). It was chaired by Mark Blyth of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who is one of the editors of the Review of International Political Economy, and it also involved two members of PaIS, Richard Higgott and Matthew Watson. The focal point of the debate was a discussion of Professor Cohen’s identification of two distinct schools of IPE, one of which he labels the ‘American School’ and the other the ‘British School’. It followed a recent exchange in RIPE after Higgott and Watson published a response to Professor Cohen’s original outline of those categories.

A recording of the debate can be found here.

More about this debate and the Warwick RIPE Debates series in general can be found at the website.