Section Chairs

Dr Melissa Johnston is a Lecturer in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland where she works in the areas of political economy and security. In 2022, Melissa received a Discovery Early Career Research Award for her project on Brideprice, Conflict and Violence Against Women in Southeast Asia.

Melissa has two main research areas. The first area examines the pivotal role of misogyny and violence against women in the political economy of violent extremism, populism and Islamist and right wing politics, looking at the empirical and analytical links between violence against women and violent extremism in Australia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Libya. Findings show that support for violence against women and misogyny is the best predictor of an individual’s support for violent extremism—a finding cited several times by the UN Secretary General in 2019 and 2020. The second area is the political economy of post-conflict rebuilding. Her doctoral dissertation, winner of the 2019 Australian Political Studies Association thesis prize, applies a feminist political economy approach to account for the uneven outcomes gender programming by international development agencies. Her journal article, ‘Frontier Finance’ was the winner of the 2021 Australian International Political Economy Network best journal article prize.

Dr Roberto Roccu is Reader in International Political Economy at King’s College London. Located in critical political economy, his work focuses on the social and political reverberations of global economic transformations, with a regional focus on North Africa and the Middle East/Western Asia. This has primarily resulted in contributions to three main fields: (i) the (global) political economy of the Arab uprisings and their ongoing aftermath; (ii) the role of international organisations (IMF, World Bank, EU, and more) in deepening patterns of ecologically devastating dependent accumulation in the region; and (iii) critical methodologies in IR and IPE. Roberto’s work has been published in journals including, among others, Journal of Common Market Studies, Review of African Political Economy, Globalizations, and International Relations.

Roberto is currently also associate editor at Global Political Economy and co-convenor of the International Political Economy Group (IPEG) of the British International Studies Association (BISA).

Past Section Chairs

2021–2023

Dr Cemal Burak Tansel is Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy & Politics of Global Development at Newcastle University. His research focuses on the political economy of development in the global South. He is the editor of States of Discipline: Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order, and Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Philosophies, Practices, Contestations (with Ian Bruff). His research has been published in, among others, the European Journal of International Relations, New Political Economy, and International Political Sociology.

Burak is a former President of the European International Studies Association and was an elected member of its Governing Board between 2019 and 2023.

Dr Lisa Tilley is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests are largely anchored in critical approaches to political sociology, economy and ecology but also cross over into critical geography and urban studies. She draws on various theoretical approaches to ‘the colonial question’ in material analyses of accumulation and expropriation with a special focus on frontiers of capital in Indonesia. Her work has appeared in New Political Economy, Sociology, and Asia Pacific Viewpoint among other journals and edited collections.

Lisa also co-founded the collaborative research project Raced Markets, which explores ‘race’ in relation to political economy. Her other positions include Associate Editor of the pedagogical resource Global Social Theory and co-convenor of the Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial Working Group of the British International Studies Association (CPD-BISA).