The international political economy
is not what it seems

The Freigeist research group ‘The international political economy is not what it seems - geopolitics in the age of offshore finance’  investigates how offshore dollar (also called Eurodollar) shape the contemporary monetary and energy order and how these two orders interact. The Eurodollar is a unique monetary phenomenon. It is a US dollar created outside the United States under foreign, usually English, law. That is, it combines the unit of account of the United States with the legal code of the United Kingdom, which allows circumventing regulations in both jurisdictions. The unregulated nature of these US dollar has important implications for the stability of the international financial system, for the financing of fossil energy companies, for the monetary power of the United States, and for the flow of illegal funds.

 

The group's work contributes to both the conceptual and empirical issues arising from the offshore dollar system. It is divided into three areas of work. First, we analyse the geopolitics of the offshore financial system. Second, we analyse the nature of money as a constitutional project and as an instrument of governance. Third, we examines the links between national and international energy policies and global financial and geopolitical dynamics.

 

The overall project is situated at the intersection between international political economy and international relations. The group is bound together by a shared epistemological interest, but we work across disciplines (political science, economics, and history) and employ different methods (qualitative, historical, and quantitative).

 

The Freigeist Research Group is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

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Learn more about the people in our group on our Team page. A complete list of our publications and working papers is available on the Research page.