Ronen P Palan University of Birmingham, UK

My work lies at the intersection between international relations, political economy, political theory, sociology and human geography. I have been working for many years on three interrelated areas. I am particularly interested in state theory and in the changing nature of the state and modes of governance in the contemporary globalised economy. I have written on the changing nature of the state in the age of globalisation. I am interested not only in the most powerful states, but also in the smallest states in the world, the tax havens, which have become, together with offshore finance, a second area of research interest. I have done in additional considerable research on different facets of contemporary theory, from realism to constructivism to post-Marxism. I am particularly interested in developing an alternative approach to political economy drawn on evolutionary institutionalism, post-rationalist perspectives and libidinal theories of political economy, the latter often confused with poststructuralism