Within mainstream GPE ‘labour’ is often subordinated to states and markets as key drivers of development. In the CGPE two of our scholars, Kevin Gray and Ben Selwyn and several of their research students have placed labour at the centre of the understanding of capitalist geo-politics and development. The centre brings a critical approach to the investigation and comprehension of labour within GPE in areas such as the ‘race-to-the-bottom’ in labour standards and conditions, the capacity of organised labour to generate more progressive developmental patterns, and labour’s impact upon domestic state actions (such as development policy) and external state relations (such as the establishment of global institutions to regulate capital and labour).
The centre works closely with colleagues in all three departments of Global Studies (International Relations, Geography and Anthropology) where there is widespread empirical, fieldwork-based and theoretical expertise on labour’s relationship to development.
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