The Story
of International Political Anthropology
The International Political Anthropology journal was established in 2008 by three European scholars: Agnes Horvath, Harald Wydra, and Bjørn Thomassen, who sought to provide a new and much needed forum for interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship by addressing problematics and concerns of the contemporary political scene through the prism of anthropologically based approaches.
The main aim that they had in mind for IPA was to give a voice to conceptual and methodological creativity, linking the study of politics to perspectives and tools drawn from disciplines or subject areas that were long considered irrelevant to the study of politics proper.
Founding Editors
Agnes Horvath
Agnes Horvath is a sociologist and political scientist with an interest in an anthropological understanding of modern society. She has a PhD in social and political sciences from the European University Institute in Florence (2000). She was affiliated visiting scholar at Cambridge University (2011-14), and now is a Visiting Research Fellow at University College, Cork. She is co-founder and chief editor of International Political Anthropology. Her recent books include Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease: Technocratic Mimetism (London: Routledge, 2022), Modernism and Charisma (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (Oxford, Berghahn, 2015, co-editor), Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking (with Arpad Szakolczai, Routledge, 2018), Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion (Routledge, 2019, co-editor), and Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations (Routledge, 2019, co-editor).
Harald Wydra
Harald Wydra is a university lecturer in politics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St Catharine's College. His general research interests include political anthropology, symbolic politics, politics of memory, and methodological approaches to the understanding of uncertainty in politics. He is a founding editor of the academic journal International Political Anthropology. Wydra is the author of the 2007 book Communism and the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). He is editor with Ágnes Horváth and Bjørn Thomassen for the Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (New York: Berghahn, 2015)
Bjørn Thomassen
Bjørn Thomassen holds a Doctoral Degree (Ph.D.) in Political and Social Science at the European University Institute, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Florence; BA and MA Degrees in Anthropology, Institute of Anthropology, Department of Political and Social Science, University of Copenhagen. He has been chair of the Department of International Relations since 2008. Before coming to AUR he taught at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and at the University College of Cork, Ireland.
International Political Anthropology Summer School (IPASS)
