Kees van der Pijl

Kees van der Pijl (born 15 June 1947) is a Dutch political scientist who is emeritus professor of international relations at the University of Sussex. He is known for his critical approach to global political economy and has published, amongst others, a trilogy on Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy (2007, 2010, 2014); Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq (2006); Transnational Classes and International Relations (1998); and The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (1984, reprinted 2012).

Biography

Kees van der Pijl studied law at Leiden University from 1965 to 1967. After military service as a reserve officer in the Royal Dutch Military Police, and a trip through the Soviet Union to Japan in 1970, he switched to political science, a specialisation taught in Leiden as part of the public law degree. His most influential teachers were Hans Daalder, Ben Sijes, and the Indologist, J.C. Heesterman, with whom he wrote his final thesis on the politics of regional diversity in India. He graduated in 1973 and was hired as a junior lecturer by the Department of International Relations at the University of Amsterdam in that year. In 1983 he received his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam on a thesis titled Imperialism and Class Formation in the North Atlantic Area, supervised by Gerd Junne. He was involved in the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) and also published short stories and three novels (1989, 1992, 1994, all with De Harmonie). Van der Pijl was co-director of the Research Centre for International Political Economy (Recipe) from 1992 to 1998. With Henk Overbeek, Ries Bode, Otto Holman, Bastiaan van Apeldoorn and others, this created a tentative Amsterdam School of global political economy.