Global Political Economy MA at University of Leeds

This Masters unites our commitment and expertise in helping understand and develop responses to the most pressing global challenges facing humanity today. Graduates in Global Political Economy (GPE) will be equipped to engage with these challenges in a manner that is progressive, offering a range of conceptual and analytical tools to help deliver change in your chosen profession.

Developing key data skills and best practice for writing policy briefs and reports you will benefit from engagement with external practitioners and experts from politics, business and civil society with our external engagement seminar series. We will also connect with other universities around the world for discussions and seminars on key issues, linking you to international voices and different approaches to GPE.

The course offers the conceptual and theoretical strengths of traditional mainstream GPE alongside many of the approaches and perspectives that have developed in the Global South. Following that grounding we focus not only on global economic governance agencies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, but also give attention to the firms and sectors and markets that generate many of the global conflicts, instabilities, crises and challenges we face. You will explore how sectors, markets and firms are linked to, for example, food and health insecurities, unemployment, job precarity, poverty, climate change and pollution.

The programme’s emphasis on real world issues allows us to place special attention on how governance agendas and their impact are experienced, negotiated and responded to in everyday lives and to compare and assess how policy and communities seek change.

The MA Global Political Economy explores global crises from the perspectives of the Global South but also highlights instances where agency is progressive and allow you to analyse cases where positive change has been delivered by democratic means and through social movements and resistance. In much of this approach, we seek to appreciate how key changes and resulting crises have been generated by a range of powerful actors from both North and South.