Google's Top Search Result for IPE is This Blog!

To my surprise today, I entered "international political economy" into Google and lo and behold, the very site you're looking at has emerged as the top search result. While I've found that results do vary from country to country--don't ask me why, ask Google--IPE Zone is usually in the top five. But, having acquired a track record over the five years it's been in existence, I suppose that all the incoming links have brought me up to today's result... and find I'm King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, A#1! It's particularly rewarding to me to have (finally) bested the wretched Wikipedia entry, which if you ask me, is a FrankenPage from hell that I outdo in PageRank anyway--but more on that some other time.

As always, many thanks to the loyal readers over the years who have brought about this magnificent showing. I literally couldn't have done it without you [sigh]. Of course, I am also grateful for newer readers who have entered the IPE Zone fold. Sometimes I honestly feel lazy about blogging, but I have somehow persevered long enough to get somewhere. Let this be a lesson to me...

That said, international political economy as a field is admittedly low in terms of general public awareness. Perhaps it's because the state of the art is stuck in what IPE stalwart Jerry Cohen calls "economistic mid-level theory" wherein economics envy has made us nearly as dull and formulaic as that certain other discipline. At any rate, I think this blog represents something of a change insofar as (a) it is not written by yet another white guy and (b) it is written by someone from the developing world. Just as there are certain problems with White People Trying to Dance, I believe there are issues with White People Trying to Pass Judgement on Us Coloured People. While I am not entirely bereft of colleagues from mainstream IPE, I remain something of an outsider because I don't suck up to anyone--least of all the practitioners of what I call "White PE" [sic].

To be truly worthy of the term "international," I believe you must have certain things like a diversity of backgrounds, ethnicities, experiences, genders, outlooks and perspectives. I'm sorry to say that mainstream IPE--alike much social science, to be fair--suffers from the phenomenon of Lots of Monolingual White Guys at American and British Universities Talking to Each Other and Calling It "International." See the academic blogosphere and the offenders are more plentiful than you can shake a stick at.  Maybe it's precisely because I am not part of their echo chamber that I have gotten this far as an an outsider, but I do think we can go even farther.

With your help, we will!

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Celebrating the IPE Zone's Five-Year Anniversary

Five Years of Fearless Blogging

Unbeknownst to me, the IPE Zone just turned five in February.. Belatedly, then, it's time to celebrate! I once had a nearly octogenarian boss who morbidly observed that her peers were all retired and many dead besides. With blogging the very model of a throwaway medium, the cycle of existence is much, much shorter than that. I too observe that most of the peer blogs I started out with are by now inactive or have since moved on to the Great IP Address in the Sky. There also have been a lot of changes in where I draw readers from. I have been through all the fads and fashions cycling in and out: blog aggregators, syndication, Facebook, Twitter and now iPhones. I am sure there will be more to come.

Originally meant to house surplus class material way back when I was still a postgrad, I remain amazed at the longevity of this blog. I certainly didn't anticipate that I would still be maintaining it five years on. Reasonably good mainstream media coverage as well as it being the world's most visible dedicated IPE blog--Google "international political economy" to see for yourselves--have made it viable for me to continue.

All the while, I believe that the IPE Zone's diversity in terms of geographical and political-economic issue coverage appeal to a broader swathe of readers. It is encouraging that many visitors come from outside of Western nations as evidenced by our blog followers' profiles, for instance. I do appreciate that, IPE having been founded largely by American and British scholars, this blog may be a harbinger of better representation by neglected third world voices. Not that I can say the same for the World Bank and IMF, but I would certainly like to see moves away from much of the whitebread sameness that permeates much of the political-economic blogosphere. The world has changed. Obviously, people with similar backgrounds tend to view the world in the same way. It is thus remarkable that an outsider has persisted in making IPE more accessible to more folks online.

So here's looking forward to more years of pull-no-punches commentary. Whether it's questioning Western hypocrisy over leadership at international organizations or the self-serving rhetoric over the value of university education, there really ought to be other voices offering....attitudes of elegant despair on subprime globalization as the subtitle says. Here at least there's truth in advertising even if you may not entirely agree with the perspectives taken here.

It goes without saying that I too have persevered due to the continuing loyalty of IPE Zone readers despite times when I simply felt tired with the whole shebang. Like Comrade Bob Mugabe, this blog is still standing--albeit under what I hope are more positive reasons

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Yay! Our LSE IDEAS, World's 4th Best Uni Thinktank

Well here's a nice bit of news concerning LSE IDEAS, the research centre I am associated with. The good folks at the University of Pennsylvania Think Tank and Civil Societies Program recently came out with the 2011 edition of their authoritative report on the world's leading thinktanks. To my personal surprise considering that LSE IDEAS only started in 2008, we are now considered the world's fourth most influential university thinktank alongside our colleagues from the Public Policy Group. Launched at the United Nations no less, the UPenn report is not a trifling one. Here is the relevant table with the 30 top-ranked university thinktanks:

Those who come ahead of us are obvious given their advantages in being longer-established and better-funded. However, consider as well those we've bested that I would not have suspected to have surpassed at all. Being a blogosphere minnow myself, I was bemused to see that the Mercatus Center of Marginal Revolution and Koch Industries-funding of the Tea Party variety fame came in 8th. Or, consider that we bested the mega-famous Jeffrey Sachs' very own Earth Institute at Columbia. The same sort of surprise comes from outranking the likes of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, and the Center for the Study of Globalization at Yale. (On another note, I am chuffed by the emergence of so many influential think tanks from outside the West. There are more folks in developing countries who also can benefit from considering policy advice, right?)

Perhaps one of the sources of strength of LSE IDEAS is its unity in having a diversity of opinions. Whether you like libertarian thought or not, the Mercatus Center is certainly consistent in its advocacy and vantage point. For us, though, our co-directors don't even agree on such basic things as a power shift from the West to the East occurring in the world economy. The same holds true with our visiting fellows and their ideological perspectives. On one hand we've hosted Niall Ferguson who styles himself as a "punk Tory." On the other hand we've also had Martin Jacques of "When China Rules the World" fame--a former editor of Marxism Today and a columnist for The Guardian.

While the IPE Zone is for now an orbiting offshoot of LSE IDEAS, note that there too is an official LSE IDEAS blog (to which I contribute to sometimes in, er, more sedate fashion).

Recalling early last year, attempts to tar us with the Libyan involvement at LSE may have actually done us good by bringing attention to our unique work alike inviting Chinese foreign ministry officials to come and share with us "What China Wants" instead of embarking on the umpteenth rehash of "Why America is So Great and You Stupid Coloured People Should Fall In Line" and its corresponding whitebread echo chamber. While some pitiably misinformed tabloid linked the presence of many top British diplomats here to being "useful idiots" of Moammar, the Woolf Report found no links between us and the the previous Libyan leadership. Sorry, there are no Moammar outfits in our closet.

Ah, but enough of that. I must salute the powers-that-be at LSE IDEAS for I did not really appreciate the comprehensiveness of their vision. It has come a long way from its humble start as the Cold War Studies programme--understanding the collapse of the Soviet bloc is the key to understanding contemporary globalization, they kept telling me--to its current recognition as one of the world's finest academic thinktanks.

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