About

This blog is a collective enterprise. It aims to investigate the current state of politics and economics in the West. The motivation behind the blog is that the current moment requires some new thinking, by the Left, about the relationship between politics and economics. We shall sometimes produce commentaries, sometimes simply draw attention to key facts about our contemporary political economy.

Initially founded by Chris Bickerton and Alex Gourevitch, The Current Moment is expanding its authorship in order to address the on-going crisis of the Eurozone and to intervene in the EU referendum scheduled to take place in the UK in 2016. Often seen as a narrow question about the UK’s relationship to the EU, this referendum in fact goes to the heart of the debate today about the meaning and scope of democracy, self-determination and our understanding of political freedom.

The Current Moment contributors:

Chris Bickerton

Chris Bickerton is University Lecturer in politics at the department of politics at international studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge. He is also Official Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge. His main focus is on European politics, including the development and future of the European Union. He is the author of European Integration: From Nation States to Member States (2012). He regularly writes for the Monde Diplo and the Wall Street Journal. He has a PhD from Oxford in international relations, and previously taught at Oxford, the University of Amsterdam and at Sciences Po in Paris. He tweets @cjbickerton.

 

Alex Gourevitch

Alex Gourevitch is Assistant Professor in Political Science at Brown University. His research lies in both the history of political and economic thought, and in contemporary debates about freedom, welfare, and economic organization. He is the author of From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (2015). He has a PhD in political science from Columbia University. He has taught at the universities of Harvard and McMaster.

 

Lee Jones

Lee is Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. His research focuses on sovereignty, intervention and statehood in the global South, particularly East Asia. He is author of ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia (2012), Societies Under Siege: Exploring How International Economic Sanctions (Do Not) Work (2015) and, with Shahar Hameiri, Governing Borderless Threats: Non-Traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation (2015). He regularly advises governments and appears in national and international media. His website is www.leejones.tk and he tweets @DrLeeJones.

 

Peter Ramsay

Peter Ramsay is an Associate Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. He works on the relation between democracy and the forms and limits of state coercion, the securitization of contemporary law and the idea of the vulnerable legal subject. He is the author of The Insecurity State: Vulnerable Autonomy and the Right to Security in the Criminal Law (2012).

We welcome contributions and suggestions. Please send any inquiries to moment.current@gmail.com.