About the Project
The Political Economy of Everything (Pe2) is an independent, reader-financed venture in research, scholarship, and publishing. The project is directed by Colin Powers (PhD, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies).
Aimed at unwinding how power, class, and history animate contemporary life, Pe2 has been built to take the best of academia—the standards, humility, and novelty it demands—while discarding the industry’s lesser attributes. Amongst the latter category, I principally refer to the pervasiveness of jargon and inaccessible language in scholarly writing, the intellectual and methodological fadism pervading many fields of study, the academy's general indifference when it comes to engaging wide readerships, and the smallness and amorality that has seeped into the social sciences in recent decades.
In keeping the good and discarding the bad in this manner, Pe2 will deliver rigor and discernment to a public discourse endemically short on each. Privileging big questions, macro phenomena, and weighty issues alone while fully embracing the politics that imbue all analytical work, we hope to one day provide a home for socially-motivated scholars and journalists from around the world.
What Is To Come
As regards the kinds of topics that will be discussed, Pe2 will often focus upon matters of money, politics, and policy in the Middle East, as Issue One has.
If the Middle East will always be central to our concerns, we nevertheless intend to branch out well beyond the region in the weeks, months, and years to come. Along immediate and mid-term horizons, for instance, we will be publishing on subjects such as the American student debt crisis, the fiscal crunch occurring at state and municipal levels in the United States today, foreign lobbying in the District of Columbia, Lebanon’s financial fiasco, management consultants in the global south, and the struggles of Jordan's teachers' syndicate, amongst other things.
In terms of outputs, we will primarily present our research through original, long-form analyses. Polemics, policy briefs, reviews, and surveys of the field will also be featured from time to time.
