The New Political Economy Initiative (co)organizes three flagship conferences that serve as vibrant platforms for exploring critical issues in political economy. Bringing together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers, these conferences foster interdisciplinary dialogue, advance research, and deepen understanding of complex socio-economic dynamics shaping the global and regional landscape. These three flagship conferences run across and carry the concerns of all the research clusters within NPEI.
NPEI’s Flagship Conferences
Conference on Economy & Society in Contemporary India 2026
Independent India is seventy five years old (1947–2023), and yet, poverty, sharp inequalities, jobless growth, among other things, continue to bedevil the Indian economy, making the study of Indian political economy complex, interesting, and consequential. Traditionally, political economy analysis of India has spanned a fascinating set of debates and scholarly issues. However, changes in India’s political economy in recent years like emerging class relations, industrial patterns, supply chains, hierarchical social relations, and unfolding ecological crises, among others, warrant an investigation from a diverse set of intellectual and disciplinary vantage points. These changes in the last few decades have given the Indian political economy a particular character and dynamic, making it a complex, large, productive, and sprawling field with an ever-growing need to present a synoptic account of contemporary India.
The Conference on Economy and Society in Contemporary India Conference aims to solidify a platform for scholars, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to share their most recent insights and research findings on the political economy of contemporary India.
The Conference on Political Economy of South Asia is an annual event co-organised by three public universities: Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, University of California Berkeley, and University of Massachusetts, Amherst and brings together the programmatic mandates for three distinct units namely New Political Economy Initiative, Institute for South Asian Studies and Political Economy Research Institute.
The current ongoing theme is South Asian Capitalism(/s), aiming to investigate how capitalist accumulation is socially structured across South Asia. For instance, we are keen on exploring the varied emergent and consequential modes in which caste/kinship/ethnicity regulates the economy, polity and material life. These explorations have political urgency: they structure, inter alia, majoritarianism, new forms of social exclusion and inequality, crises of stagnation and unemployment.
Conference on Political Economy of Global South 2026
The Conference on Political Economy of Global South (PEGS) is a result of a collaboration between the five university-based political economy centres, namely New Political Economy Initiative at IIT Bombay, Pathways Beyond Neoliberalism: Voices from MENA at the American University Cairo, Centre for Critical Imagination at Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning, Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Program for the Economic Analysis of Mexico at El Colegio de México and Teaching and Researching Equitable Economics from the South at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia.
The premise of this conference is that despite political and historical divergence within the Global South, nations outside the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) share many basic structural features that require comparative study. Further, such comparative study has to take place on a South-South if we are to create new political economy thinking. Hence this event aims to contribute to the conception and development of a governance reform agenda for the Global South as a whole, emphasizing commonalities and complementarities while also acknowledging incompatibilities and divergences.