Nominations are open for the 2024 Albies!

It’s time to select the best work on political economy for the 2024 calendar year.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

We are just starting December, which means it is time for the hard-workiung staff here at Drezner’s World to announce that nominations are open for the 2024 Albies!

This is an annual list of the best work in political economy that began 16 years ago when I was blogging for Foreign Policy. I kept in going during my years at the Washington Post. I am bound and determined to keep this up here on the Substacks.

My criteria for an Albie remain as follows: “Any book, journal article, magazine piece, working paper, op-ed or blog post published in the calendar year [about the politics of the global economy] that made you rethink how the world works in such a way that you will never be able to ‘unthink’ the argument.”

Over the years my definition has widened even further than that; past Albie winners have included fictional work like the film Margin Call; in 2022 ChatGPT made the list. Clearly, an Albie does not need to appear in a peer-reviewed journal or university press book (though it should be noted that those attributes are not bad things either). The argument and/or evidence needs to be clear and compelling — which is, alas, harder to do with respect to the global political economy than you might think.

The Albies are named in honor of Albert O. Hirschman, author of “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” “The Passions and the Interests,” “National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade” and other stellar books and papers. For outstanding biographies of Hirschman, check out Jeremy Adelman’s outstanding “Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman” as well as Michele Alacevich’s “Albert O. Hirschman: An Intellectual Biography.”

If you need to get a better sense of what I am talking about, please check out the 2023 Albie winners:

2024 could perhaps best be defined by a public repudiation of inflation. Even as inflation has declined across the globe, resentment against higher prices for basic necessities led to a surge of anti-incumbent politics spanning the globe. The legacy of this year’s elections on the future global political economy could be very long-lasing indeed.

This is not like those annual best-film or best-book lists that are completed six weeks before the calendar year ends and posted the first week of December. It is entirely possible, nay, likely, that an Albie winner will be published in this month. Therefore the winners will be announced, as per usual, on December 31st.

Submit away!