The seminar is dedicated to reading and discussing the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital. It introduces the Marxian project of a critique of political economy. This expression, which is contained in the subtitle of the book, has a double meaning: It refers to the need to criticise the categories used by political economists when they seek to explain capitalism, as well as to need to criticise the capitalist mode of production, which is based on class domination. We will cover topics such as the theory of value and money, commodity fetishism, class conflict and class formation, capital accumulation, crises and – last but not least – politics and the capitalist state.


What stakes are at play within the current global political economy? Rising inequality, deepening social antagonisms, and market logic with impunity in the face of the climate emergency. International Political Economy has so far responded to these recurring concerns as representative of the long-standing relationship between power and wealth. Yet other relationships, namely those that involve imperialism, race and gender, and settler colonialism have been marginal to these debates. Following on recent calls for a more ‘global conversation’ within GPE that pays greater attention to spaces and communities beyond Europe and North America, this module seeks to confront the Eurocentric analysis of global political economy that might inform our understandings of contemporary issues of neoliberal conjuncture of global capitalism. This course offers an historically-informed reassessment of political economy that exposes its imperial foundations by drawing on the entangled histories between European industrialization, Atlantic slavery and its civilizing mission. The course broadly surveys the role of land and dispossession as both object and instrument of colonial power in the consolidation of the settlercolonial state. The colonial origins of poverty within 18th century neoclassical tradition and the case of Haiti to explore ways debt was weaponized to compromise the nation-building processes of the world’s first black republic. This historical foregrounding situates contemporary challenges and political struggles as the colonial afterlives of contemporary global economic globalisation to explore issues of financialization and the “rise” of corporate power, global care work and social reproduction, extractive industries and the ecology as well as the return to alt-right populism and anti-imperial politics in the form of reparations. By confronting the colonial amnesia of the discipline, the module hopes to provide students with interdisciplinary analyses that renders visible global political economy to its embedded relationship with coloniality, racism, sexism or anthropocentrism and to invite new framings and questions to attend to the ongoing global crises.


This course aims to introduce students to the core theoretical debates and empirical issue-areas of the state-civil society relations by focusing on the emerging authoritarian state transformation and changing roles of civil society organizations in this process from a comparative perspective. The course is divided into two parts. The first part introduces students to the major theoretical frameworks used for understanding the theoretical and historical foundations of state-civil society relations by focusing on civil society organizations. The second part then looks at the rise of civil society organizations in recent authoritarian state transformations with examples from different parts of the world. In this context, this part also focuses on various forms of resistance by civil society organizations and social movements against the new authoritarian regimes. The aim is to provide the students with the necessary analytical tools that can be used in the study of the links between recent authoritarian state transformation, changing balance of state apparatuses and civil society organizations, and forms of civil societies.


The course will trace the origins of Germany’s export strength and its ramifications for the European Union member states and beyond. Particular attention will be given to the German Central Bank (Bundesbank) up to the introduction of the Euro and to the German monetary policy circles after the establishment of the European Central Bank. The French Regulation Theory will be presented and applied to the German case.