Where will the conference take place?

The conference will be held in Lisbon, PRT.

16th Annual IIPPE Conference – Capitalism Moving Beyond Neoliberalism: Crises, Changes, and What Comes Next

Name: 16th Annual IIPPE Conference – Capitalism Moving Beyond Neoliberalism: Crises, Changes, and What Comes Next
Start: 2026-09-09T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-09-12T00:00:00Z
Location: Lisbon

Sep 9–12, 2026Lisbon, PortugalIn-person

Registration open

The 16th Annual IIPPE Conference, themed "Capitalism Moving Beyond Neoliberalism: Crises, Changes, and What Comes Next," will convene in Lisbon, Portugal. This event serves as a critical forum for scholars and practitioners to analyze the current state of global capitalism, particularly in the wake of recent crises, and to explore potential pathways for its evolution beyond the neoliberal paradigm. The conference aims to foster a comprehensive discussion on the systemic challenges facing contemporary economies and societies. Participants will delve into the multifaceted crises impacting global political economy, examining the structural shifts and emerging alternatives to dominant economic models. The conference provides a platform for rigorous academic exchange, encouraging diverse perspectives on how capitalism is transforming and what future trajectories might entail. It seeks to identify the forces driving change and to articulate visions for a more equitable and sustainable global economic order.

Committees & topics

Topics
Capitalism Moving Beyond Neoliberalism: Crises, Changes, and What Comes Next · The Political Economy of China's Development · China and Global Capitalism · China and the Development of BRICS and the Global South · China's Plan for Socialist Modernisation and Its Impacts on Global Capitalism · The Political Economy of China's Development and Its Response to Neoliberalism and Financialisation · China's Five-Year Plans, the Two Centennial Goals, and the Common Prosperity Agenda · China's Industrial Policy and Its Future

Why it matters

This conference is particularly relevant in the current global climate, where traditional economic frameworks are under increasing scrutiny. The focus on moving "beyond neoliberalism" signals a recognition that existing models may no longer be adequate to address pressing global issues such as inequality, climate change, and geopolitical instability. By bringing together experts to discuss these challenges, the conference contributes to a broader intellectual effort to reimagine economic governance and development.

The discussions at the conference will likely touch upon the rise of new economic powers and the shifting balance of global influence. As countries like CHN, IND, and BRA continue to grow, their economic models and development philosophies offer alternative perspectives to the Western-centric neoliberal consensus. Understanding these diverse approaches is crucial for comprehending the future of global capitalism and for anticipating potential shifts in international relations and economic cooperation. The insights generated from this conference could inform policy debates and academic research for years to come, shaping our understanding of the forces that will define the next era of global political economy.

How to prepare

To effectively engage with the conference themes, delegates should undertake a thorough review of contemporary critiques of neoliberalism and explore emerging economic theories that propose alternatives. Familiarity with the historical evolution of capitalism and its various phases will provide a crucial foundation for understanding the current juncture. Consider how different national contexts, particularly those of emerging economies, are experiencing and responding to the perceived limitations of neoliberal policies.

Delegates should also prepare to analyze the interconnections between economic crises and broader societal and political transformations. This includes examining how economic shifts impact social welfare, labor markets, and democratic institutions. Developing a nuanced understanding of these linkages will enable more insightful contributions to discussions on "what comes next" for capitalism. Consider applying frameworks such as "What Is Stakeholder Mapping?" or "Dynamic Analysis" to understand the complex interplay of actors and forces shaping economic change.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Portugal

As the host nation in Europe, PRT provides a European perspective on the challenges of neoliberalism and the search for new economic models.

Role in topic

PRT's experience within the European Union, particularly its economic adjustments and social policies, offers a case study for discussions on the impact of neoliberal policies and the potential for alternative approaches within established economic blocs.

China

CHN represents a major non-Western economic power whose state-led development model offers a significant alternative to neoliberal capitalism.

Role in topic

CHN's economic trajectory and its growing influence on global trade and finance challenge the universality of neoliberal principles. Its model provides a critical counterpoint in discussions about the future of capitalism, particularly regarding state intervention, industrial policy, and global economic governance.

United States

The USA, as a historical proponent of neoliberal policies, faces internal and external pressures to re-evaluate its economic model.

Role in topic

The USA's economic policies and their global impact are central to any discussion on neoliberalism. Internal debates about inequality, industrial policy, and trade relations, alongside its role in international economic institutions, make its perspective crucial for understanding both the origins and potential transformations of global capitalism.

Brazil

BRA, as a significant emerging economy, navigates the complexities of global capitalism while seeking to address domestic development challenges.

Role in topic

BRA's experiences with commodity cycles, social programs, and regional economic integration provide valuable insights into how developing countries grapple with the promises and pitfalls of global capitalism and the search for sustainable development paths beyond traditional neoliberal prescriptions.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Capitalism Moving Beyond Neoliberalism: Crises, Changes, and What Comes Next

Neoliberalism emerged as the dominant global economic paradigm in the late 1970s and 1980s, advanced through the Thatcher and Reagan governments, the Washington Consensus, and the policy conditionalities of the IMF and World Bank. Its core tenets — deregulation, privatisation, trade and capital liberalisation, and the disciplining of labour — reshaped both advanced and developing economies, accelerated financialisation, and produced rising inequality alongside recurrent financial instability. The 2008 global financial crisis exposed deep structural fragilities, and although neoliberal policy frameworks largely survived, their political legitimacy has eroded. Since 2008, successive shocks — the eurozone debt crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, the inflation surge of 2021–2023, and intensifying geopolitical fragmentation — have prompted a partial return of industrial policy, fiscal activism, and economic statecraft. The US Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act, the EU Green Deal Industrial Plan, and China's dual circulation and Made in China 2025 strategies all signal a move toward more interventionist, security-conscious economic governance. Yet financial markets remain dominant, real wages have stagnated in many economies, and climate breakdown imposes new structural constraints. The debate today concerns whether these shifts constitute a genuine transition beyond neoliberalism — toward a more state-led, redistributive, or ecologically planned capitalism — or merely a recalibration that preserves capital's structural power. Heterodox economists, Global South governments, and labour movements increasingly press for alternatives ranging from green developmentalism to socialist modernisation, while incumbent powers seek to reorganise globalisation along bloc lines.

Key players

The Political Economy of China's Development

China's development trajectory since 1978 represents one of the most significant economic transformations in modern history. Beginning with Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening, the Chinese state combined market mechanisms with sustained public ownership of strategic assets, state-directed credit allocation, and long-horizon planning. Rural decollectivisation, township and village enterprises, special economic zones, and accession to the WTO in 2001 successively integrated China into global production networks while preserving central control over finance, land, and key industries. The result has been an average growth rate above 9% for three decades, the lifting of roughly 800 million people out of extreme poverty, and the emergence of China as the world's largest manufacturer and second-largest economy. However, the model also generated rapid increases in inequality, regional imbalances, environmental degradation, a large local-government and real-estate debt overhang, and dependence on external demand. Since the 2008 crisis and especially under Xi Jinping, policy has shifted toward rebalancing growth toward domestic consumption, upgrading industrial capabilities, and reasserting party-state coordination over private capital. The political economy debate centres on how to characterise the Chinese system — as state capitalism, market socialism, or a distinct socialist modernisation — and on whether its institutional architecture can navigate slowing growth, demographic ageing, and intensifying external constraints from US-led technology controls.

Key players

China and Global Capitalism

China's integration into the world economy, accelerated by its 2001 WTO accession, fundamentally restructured global capitalism. It became the central node of global manufacturing supply chains, anchored a wave of commodity demand that reshaped Global South economies, and contributed to the so-called 'great moderation' through cheap manufactured exports. Chinese savings and reserve accumulation also helped finance US deficits, embedding a structural co-dependence between the two largest economies. Since the late 2010s this integration has come under strain. The US–China trade war initiated in 2018, escalating semiconductor and AI export controls, the COVID-19 supply shock, and Western 'de-risking' strategies have pushed both sides toward partial decoupling in strategic sectors. Simultaneously, China has expanded its outward footprint through the Belt and Road Initiative, the internationalisation of the renminbi, and growing technological capability in electric vehicles, batteries, solar, and telecommunications equipment. The core analytical question is whether China remains a subordinate, if powerful, component of a US-led capitalist world system, or whether it is constituting a distinct pole capable of reshaping the rules of global accumulation. This bears directly on debates over hegemonic transition, the future of the dollar system, and the prospects for a multipolar economic order.

Key players

China and the Development of BRICS and the Global South

BRICS originated as an investment-bank acronym in 2001, became a formal grouping in 2009, and expanded to BRICS+ in 2024 with the addition of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE, with further partners added in 2025. Throughout this evolution China has been the grouping's largest economy and principal driver of institution-building, anchoring the New Development Bank, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, and successive initiatives to reduce dependence on the dollar-based financial system. China's engagement with the broader Global South spans the Belt and Road Initiative, large-scale infrastructure lending, South–South cooperation programmes, and growing trade and investment in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. This engagement has provided developing countries with alternative sources of finance and industrial inputs, but has also raised concerns about debt sustainability, environmental impact, and labour standards. China presents its approach as non-interventionist and developmentally oriented, distinct from Western conditionalities. The contemporary debate concerns whether BRICS+ and Chinese-led initiatives can deliver a meaningful alternative architecture for development finance, trade settlement, and technology transfer, or whether internal heterogeneity — including rivalries between China and India and divergent political systems — will limit the bloc's coherence. The question matters acutely for Global South states seeking policy space amid debt distress and climate transition demands.

Key players

China's Plan for Socialist Modernisation and Its Impacts on Global Capitalism

At the 19th Party Congress in 2017 and reaffirmed at the 20th in 2022, the Communist Party of China set out a two-stage plan to 'basically achieve socialist modernisation' by 2035 and build a 'great modern socialist country' by 2049, the centenary of the People's Republic. The strategy combines accelerated industrial upgrading, technological self-reliance under the 'new productive forces' framing, green transition, and reduced inequality through 'common prosperity'. It is operationalised through the Five-Year Plans, Made in China 2025, and the dual-circulation strategy emphasising the domestic market as the primary engine of growth. For global capitalism, this agenda has several consequences. China's push into advanced manufacturing — semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, solar, biotech — directly contests sectors long dominated by US, European, Japanese, and Korean firms. State-directed investment in green technologies has driven down global costs but also triggered overcapacity disputes and protectionist responses, including EU tariffs on Chinese EVs and expanded US Section 301 measures. Meanwhile, the renminbi's gradual internationalisation and bilateral settlement arrangements chip at dollar dominance at the margins. The central debate is whether socialist modernisation represents a coherent alternative model with global ideological appeal, or primarily a domestic legitimation strategy whose external effects are mediated through ordinary trade and investment competition. Either way, its implementation is reshaping global production, technology standards, and the political economy of the green transition.

Key players

The Political Economy of China's Development and Its Response to Neoliberalism and Financialisation

China's reform era unfolded in parallel with the global ascendancy of neoliberalism, but the Chinese state retained instruments — capital controls, a state-owned banking system, public land ownership, and strategic SOEs — that buffered it from full convergence with the Washington Consensus. During the 1990s and 2000s, selective liberalisation coexisted with continued state direction of credit and investment, allowing rapid integration into global value chains without surrendering macro-financial sovereignty. The 2008 global financial crisis marked an inflection point. A massive stimulus package channelled through state banks and local government financing vehicles propped up global demand but also fuelled a credit boom, a housing bubble, and rising corporate and local-government debt. In response, policymakers since the mid-2010s have pursued financial de-risking campaigns, tightened oversight of fintech and platform capital — including the suspension of the Ant Group IPO in 2020 — capped real-estate leverage through the 'three red lines', and reasserted party oversight of private firms. The 'common prosperity' agenda explicitly targets the inequality and rentier dynamics associated with financialisation. The analytical question is whether China is constructing a genuinely non-financialised growth regime aligned with productive investment and planning, or whether financialisation pressures — through real estate, shadow banking, and capital account opening — will continue to assert themselves. The outcome shapes both China's own stability and the broader debate over alternatives to neoliberal capitalism.

Key players

China's Five-Year Plans, the Two Centennial Goals, and the Common Prosperity Agenda

Five-Year Plans have structured Chinese economic policy since 1953 and, despite extensive marketisation, remain central to coordinating investment, industrial priorities, and social policy. The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) emphasised technological self-reliance, dual circulation, green development, and demographic adaptation, while the forthcoming 15th Plan is expected to deepen the focus on advanced manufacturing, AI, and household consumption. These plans operate alongside the 'two centennial goals': building a 'moderately prosperous society in all respects' by 2021 — declared achieved with the elimination of absolute rural poverty — and building a 'great modern socialist country' by 2049. The 'common prosperity' agenda, elevated in 2021, articulates a distributional dimension to this trajectory. It targets excessive incomes, regulates platform monopolies, promotes 'tertiary distribution' through philanthropic and social mechanisms, and seeks to expand the middle-income group. In practice, the campaign has produced regulatory crackdowns on after-school tutoring, gaming, and large tech platforms, alongside fiscal reforms and pilot programmes on property taxation and rural revitalisation. Debates focus on the coherence and feasibility of this agenda amid slowing growth, a protracted property downturn, high local-government debt, and demographic decline. Critics question whether common prosperity can deliver structural redistribution without deeper fiscal reform, while proponents see it as the social complement to socialist modernisation.

Key players

China's Industrial Policy and Its Future

Chinese industrial policy has evolved from the import-substituting heavy-industry priorities of the Mao era through the export-oriented, FDI-driven model of the reform period to today's mission-oriented framework targeting frontier technologies. Landmark programmes include the Medium- and Long-Term Plan for Science and Technology (2006), Strategic Emerging Industries (2010), Made in China 2025 (2015), and the more recent 'new productive forces' concept. Policy instruments combine direct subsidies, state-guided investment funds, procurement preferences, technology transfer requirements, and coordinated infrastructure deployment. Results have been uneven but significant. China now leads global production in solar panels, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and high-speed rail, and has become a major player in 5G, drones, and shipbuilding. Semiconductors and commercial aviation remain areas of dependence, intensified by US export controls on advanced chips and equipment imposed from 2022 onward. Local-government competition has produced both rapid scaling and overcapacity, with EVs and solar exemplifying both successes and trade frictions with the EU and US. The future of Chinese industrial policy hinges on whether it can sustain innovation under tightening external technology constraints, manage overcapacity without destabilising trade relationships, and reorient toward consumption-driven growth. It also serves as a global reference point: industrial policy is being rehabilitated in the US, EU, and India, partly in response to and partly in emulation of the Chinese model.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 16th Annual IIPPE Conference – Capitalism Moving Beyond Neoliberalism: Crises, Changes, and What Comes Next.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Delimitation Based on 2011 Census

Supreme Court Upholds Election Commission Dis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

What Is Stakeholder Mapping?

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Policy Brief Writing

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Conflict Resolution

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

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Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

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Portugal September 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

16th Annual IIPPE Conference – Capitalism Moving Beyond Neoliberalism: Crises, Changes, and What Comes Next

Sep 9–12, 2026Lisbon, PortugalIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Capitalism Moving Beyond Neoliberalism: Crises, Changes, and What Comes Next · The Political Economy of China's Development · China and Global Capitalism · China and the Development of BRICS and the Global South · China's Plan for Socialist Modernisation and Its Impacts on Global Capitalism · The Political Economy of China's Development and Its Response to Neoliberalism and Financialisation · China's Five-Year Plans, the Two Centennial Goals, and the Common Prosperity Agenda · China's Industrial Policy and Its Future

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Portugal

As the host nation in Europe, PRT provides a European perspective on the challenges of neoliberalism and the search for new economic models.

Role in topic

China

CHN represents a major non-Western economic power whose state-led development model offers a significant alternative to neoliberal capitalism.

Role in topic

United States

The USA, as a historical proponent of neoliberal policies, faces internal and external pressures to re-evaluate its economic model.

Role in topic

Brazil

BRA, as a significant emerging economy, navigates the complexities of global capitalism while seeking to address domestic development challenges.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Capitalism Moving Beyond Neoliberalism: Crises, Changes, and What Comes Next

Key players

The Political Economy of China's Development

Key players

China and Global Capitalism

Key players

China and the Development of BRICS and the Global South

Key players

China's Plan for Socialist Modernisation and Its Impacts on Global Capitalism

Key players

The Political Economy of China's Development and Its Response to Neoliberalism and Financialisation

Key players

China's Five-Year Plans, the Two Centennial Goals, and the Common Prosperity Agenda

Key players

China's Industrial Policy and Its Future

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 16th Annual IIPPE Conference – Capitalism Moving Beyond Neoliberalism: Crises, Changes, and What Comes Next.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Delimitation Based on 2011 Census

Supreme Court Upholds Election Commission Dis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

What Is Stakeholder Mapping?

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Policy Brief Writing

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Conflict Resolution

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Portugal September 2026

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Conferência "O Futuro da Segurança da Europa"

Conference “Hybrid Threats – Countering Complexity in an Interconnected World”

A Segurança Europeia num Mundo em Transformação

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Frequently asked questions