The Prize Committee is delighted to announce that the article by Linda Weiss and Elizabeth Thurbon, “Power Paradox: How the Extension of US Infrastructural Power Abroad Diminishes State Capacity at Home,” published in the Review of International Political Economy, has been voted the winner of the 2019 Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize.
In their article, Weiss and Thurbon offer an innovative contribution to enduring Comparative and International Political Economy debates over the nature of “power” itself, as well as wider concerns for the sources of policy effectiveness or pathology. More specifically, they highlight the paradoxical ways in which “the vastly increased economic power of US corporations has come about both by virtue of, and at the expense of, the US state itself.” These tensions, they argue, have stemmed from processes by which the US “internationalized its infrastructural power through trade agreements that have sought to globalize US [intellectual property rights].” While noting that these policies have “delivered major benefits to its corporations,” Weiss and Thurbon also highlight the ways in which such measures have “created the conditions that are steadily chipping away at [US] infrastructural power at home.” For this combination of theoretical and policy insight, the Committee congratulates them – and looks forward to further work in this light!
The prize will be awarded at the upcoming 11th AIPEN workshop in Sydney and Linda Weiss and Elizabeth Thurbon will be invited to write a PPE post on the winning article.
Winners of the AIPEN Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize
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):779–810 (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):39–54 (2017).
2017 – Samanthi J. Gunawardana, ‘“To Finish, We Must Finish”: Everyday Practices of Depletion in Sri Lankan Export-Processing Zones’, Globalizations, 13:6: 861-75 (2016).
2016 – Gareth Bryant, ‘“Fixing” the Climate Crisis: Capital, States and Carbon Offsetting in India’ (co-authored with Siddhartha Dabhi and Steffen Böhm), Environment and Planning A, 47:10 (2015).
2015 – Ainsley Elbra, ‘Interests Need Not be Pursued if They Can be Created: Private Governance in African Gold Mining’, Business and Politics, 16:2 (2014).
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