Political economy, international law and the messiness of social relations in 'the field'

Law and Methods Seminar

Guest Speaker: Liam Campling, Professor of International Business and Development, Queen Mary University of London, and Senior Visiting Fellow at Sciences Po Law School.

This seminar with Liam Campling will start with him setting out his experiences studying the political economy of global value chains and their articulations with a variety of international legal forms. The first area of study required 'following the thing' — in this case tuna — across multiple jurisdictions, interviewing over 800 people in around 20 countries over a period of 17 years. The second study is more territorially bounded, focussing on labour standards in the automotive industry in South Korea in the context of a free trade agreement with the EU. In each study, new categories were developed in order to explain distributional outcomes. We will then discuss the experiences of other political economists who have mediated Marxist categories to grapple with the Chief, the Prisoner and the Refugee to develop original understandings of these important social relations.