Sandra Halperin

MA University of California, Los Angeles

PhD University of California, Los Angeles

I earned postgraduate degrees in Political Science (M.A., PhD) from the University of  Califronia, Los Angeles, where my major field of study was International Relations, with minors in Comparative Politics and Middle East History.

I taught courses in International Relations theory and in Middle East politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh before moving, in 1998, to the University of Sussex. I joined the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway in August 2006.

My research interests include global development, the historical sociology of global relations, the causes and conditions of war and peace, and Middle East politics.

Most of my research has focused on the nature and shape of global development and its impact on different parts of the world. Its central concern is with structures of social power, their relationship to different developmental outcomes, how they have evolved over time locally, transnationally, and cross-regionally; and what factors and conditions, historically, have proved necessary for their reproduction and transformation.

 My first book, In the Mirror of the Third World: capitalist development in modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 1997), challenges conventional accounts of European industrialisation by showing that European and contemporary third world development was more similar than dissimilar and that, in both contexts, industrial capitalist development was shaped by broadly similar social structures and processes.

I develop this thesis further in War and Social Change in Modern Europe: the great transformation revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004). This volume focuses on the interrelationship of social forces, industrial expansion, and conflict in Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its interpretation of this period is developed, in part, through a critique of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944) and it challenges, not only Polanyi’s analysis, but a variety of influential perspectives on conflict, development, nationalism, and globalisation. 

In a recent elaboration of some of the themes of my earlier work, Re-Envisioning Global Development: a ‘horizontal’ perspective (Routledge 2013), I endeavor to show is that capitalist development has been, from the start, essentially trans-national in nature and global in scope involving, not whole societies, but the advanced sectors of dualistic economies in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. The aim of the book is to analytically shift the axis of view from the vertical (states, regions) to the horizontal (classes, networks).

Currently, I am working on a study entitled ‘The Middle East in Global Development’. The project builds on arguments from Re-Envisioning Global Development, and on research I completed for my PhD thesis (War and Social Change: a comparative study of 19th C. Europe & the contemporary Middle East, University of California, Los Angeles).

Undergraduate:

• PR3600: Contemporary Middle East Politics (course leader)
• PR3595: Nationalism in World Politics (Course leader)
• PR2440 International Relations Theory (Course leader)

Postgraduate:

• PR5432: Analysing International Politics (course co-leader)
• PR5919: Research Design in Politics and International Relations (course leader)
• PR5929: Conflict & Conflict Resolution in the Middle East