In June, the Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy (BPFD) at BESI marked an important milestone with the 2026 Finance & Democracy Summer Workshop at the London School of Economics, an intensive two-day program for advanced doctoral candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and early-career scholars studying finance as a central force in political economy, democracy, and state power.
Building on two successful prior editions hosted at Brown University, the 2026 workshop was convened jointly by BPFD, the Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at Brown, the European Institute at LSE, and the new Huth Initiative for a New Political Economy at LSE. Following a competitive open call, the program selected 30 participants from an international pool of more than 200 applicants from disciplines spanning political science, sociology, history, and geography.
Over two days, participants worked closely with eight distinguished instructors — Mark Blyth (Brown), Daniela Gabor (SOAS University of London), Marion Fourcade (UC Berkeley), Benjamin Braun (LSE), Ilias Alami (Cambridge University), Annina Kaltenbrunner (Leeds University Business School), Leah Downey (King’s College London), and Mathias Larsen (LSE) — across a curriculum ranging from the bond market and the state to finance and law, state capitalism, finance and the Chinese state, finance and technology, and money and democratic governance. A central goal was to build community, weaving an emerging generation of interdisciplinary researchers into a durable international network organized around the study of finance, political economy, and democracy.
The Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy launched last fall with a mission to catalyze critical scholarship that examines how finance drives inequality and explores democratic alternatives. To that end, BPFD produces original research, convenes scholars across disciplines, and supports emerging researchers. Our current research streams include financial oligarchy, cryptocurrency and shadow finance, and theories of financial accumulation.
BESI Technology Network faculty director Marion Fourcade delivers a lecture at the 2026 Finance & Democracy Summer School at the London School of Economics. (Photo/Benjamin Braun)
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Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy's research director offers a new perspective on the birth of neoliberalism, showing that — counter to the prevailing narrative — financialization was not the offspring of deregulation but the mechanism that allowed neoliberalism to take root.
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In this article for the journal Policy and Society, BESI Technology Network affiliate Brian Judge and his co-authors at the Center for Human-Compatible AI examine the challenges of regulating AI and propose an adapted model of regulation suitable for AI's novel features.
