Warwick/RIPE Debate 2008
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.
The participants in the 2008 debate are shown in the two pictures below. From left to right as you look at the screen, they are: Mark Blyth, Matthew Watson, Benjamin Cohen and Richard Higgott.
For anyone browsing this page from the University of Warwick campus, the articles in RIPE can all be accessed electronically via the University’s ejournals subscription. The original Cohen article can be found here
(RIPE 14 (2), 197-219, 2007); the response by Higgott and Watson can be found here (RIPE 15 (1), 1-17, 2008); and Cohen’s rejoinder to the response can be found here (RIPE 15 (1), 30-34, 2008). All users of the website have unrestricted access to a full recording of the debate, which also includes the question and answer session involving the audience. The recording can be found here. It is an mp3 file and plays through Windows Media Player.
