The Prize Committee is delighted to announce that the article by Melissa Johnston, “Frontier finance: the role of microfinance in debt and violence in post-conflict Timor-Leste,” published in the journal, Review of International Political Economy has won the 2021 Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize.
The Committee in awarding the prize commends Frontier Finance for its ambitious and novel research agenda. Among the strengths of the article is its methodological innovation and how it presents a compelling case for the use of ethnography and fieldwork for moving beyond the usual starting points of IPE scholarship. Johnston’s article seamlessly links ‘gendered circuits of violence’ and ‘accumulation regimes’ occurring from the practice of bride price to the promotion of microfinance as a global template in post-conflict economic recovery. Analytically, the article demonstrates how a well-established issue of gender and microfinance can be re-examined through new conceptual lenses and in ways that make visible the overlapping of political economy, gendered violence and security. Last, the article speaks to the ongoing relevance of IPE scholarship for researching global political economic processes in Asia and the Pacific region.
The Committee congratulates Melissa Johnston and invites our broader community to read and engage with the intellectual contributions of Frontier Finance.
The prize will be awarded at a future AIPEN workshop and Melissa Johnston will be invited to write a PPE post on the winning article.
Past awardees
2020 Claire Parfitt, ‘ESG Integration Treats Ethics as Risk, but Whose Ethics and Whose Risk? Responsible Investment in the Context of Precarity and Risk-Shifting’, Critical Sociology, 46:4-5 (2020).
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 (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 (2017).
2017 Samanthi J. Gunawardana, ‘“To Finish, We Must Finish”: Everyday Practices of Depletion in Sri Lankan Export-Processing Zones”, Globalizations, 13:6 (2016).
2016 Gareth Bryant, Siddhartha Dabhi and Steffen Böhm, ‘“Fixing” the Climate Crisis: Capital, States and Carbon Offsetting in India’, 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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