Ronen Palan is Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of International Politics at the City University London. He has many books and articles on the political economy of the state, globalisation and state strategies, and evolutionary approaches to the study of international relations. Ronen Palan was of the founding editors of the Review of International Political Economy. Palan's major empirical work is the area of offshore finance. Palan has argued that offshore finance "is certainly not the sole cause for the decline of the nation-state, but it must be seen as an important contributing factor to the decline".
As a student, Palan attended the London School of Economics, and subsequently worked at Newcastle University and the University of Sussex before joining Birmingham in 2007. Palan has authored and edited a number of books, including Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories (edited, Routledge, 2000), The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires (Cornell University Press, 2003), The Imagined Economies of Globalisation (with Angus Cameron, Sage, 2004) and Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works (with Richard Murphy, Christian Chavagneux, Cornell University Press, 2010).
Ronen Palan is married and has two sons.