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Lecturer in International Relations, The University of the West Indies: St. Augustine Campus

Matthew Bishop has been Lecturer in International Relations at IIR since late 2009. Before taking up this post he taught in the Department of Politics at The University of Sheffield, UK, from where he also earned his PhD. He is the managing editor of the Caribbean Journal of International Relations & Diplomacy, the in-house journal of the institute. He also holds an honorary research fellowship from the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) and comments regularly on its influential blog.

He has undertaken consultancies on behalf of various organisations, including the UK Department for International Development (DfID), The Commonwealth Secretariat, and Project Ploughshares/the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC). In early 2014, Matthew will be on study leave, and will be taking up visiting positions at Wuhan University in China, and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, the latter under the EU’s Mundus Mapp programme.

Research Interests
Matthew’s main area of research interest is the political economy of development, with a particular focus on small states and, especially, the independent and non-independent territories of the Caribbean. Of late, his work has increasingly centred upon the ways in which smaller developing countries are adjusting to the multiple crises of global finance, climate change, commodity prices, the end of preferences, and marginalisation within the institutions of global governance. Beyond this agenda, Matthew is also interested in regional and multilateral trade politics, regional integration, and the global politics of democratisation. He has published widely on all of these themes.

Matthew is currently working on the development of a number of new research strands:

The development crisis in the Caribbean, represented by an edited book provisionally entitled Existential Threats and Caribbean Development
Climate change governance in small states (with Dr Michelle Scobie)
The crisis in the WTO and its implications for trade multilateralism (with Dr Valbona Muzaka of King’s College, London)

Hegemonic transitions in the Caribbean: China and the USA (with Professor Andy Knight)

Regional deepening in the OECS and its significance for Caribbean regionalism more broadly

The fallout of the global crisis in the developing world and the contemporary distribution of growth and development (with Professors Anthony Payne and Nicola Phillips of the University of Sheffield)

The political economy of development in small ‘developmental’ states, with a specific focus on industrialisation in Trinidad and Tobago since the 1950s

Experience

  • –present
    Lecturer in International Relations, The University of the West Indies: St. Augustine Campus