Everyday international political economy

Abstract

In recent years a new perspective, which might be termed everyday international political economy (EIPE), has begun to emerge within the discipline of IPE. Still only in its formative phase, its central task is to map out the relationship between the actions of everyday actors and the global economy and, in effect, to bring the everyday into the study of IPE. This movement is overwhelmingly concerned with highlighting how change in the world economy requires practices to be engrained in the lives of non-elite actors, and that such agents have actual or potential agency in transforming their own political and economic environments. When aggregated, changes in the everyday then have knock-on effects that lead to change in the world economy. In this chapter we suggest that there are now emerging two variants of EIPE; what we call the everyday life and everyday politics approaches. The former contains a strong emphasis on disciplinary logics while the latter is a moreaction-based approach. Overall, EIPE imports insights from the everyday literature that was pioneered outside of the discipline. As we explain, the disciplinary/everyday life approach draws from social theorists, such as Henri Lefebvre (1971, 1991b) and Michel Foucault (1980), while the actions-based/everyday politics approach draws more from the political-anthropological works of James Scott (1976, 1985), Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet (1990, 2005) and others. But what unites these variants is that in seeking to bring the everyday actor into focus they issue different visions of the world economy to that provided by mainstream accounts. As we explain in the first section, we see conventional IPE, or what we call regulatoryIPE (RIPE from henceforth), as overly concerned with providing a purely top-down understanding of a small number of big and important things that exist within the world economy. These comprise principally trade and financial flows, as well as international economic regulatory institutions and hegemony. Focussing only on the elites of the world economy, states, regions, and hegemons, RIPE necessarily obscures the everyday lives of ordinary people from view. How the world economy is played out at the everyday level of ordinary people, and how such people might even impact the world economy is a lacuna that everyday political economists seek to fill. EIPE also seeks, albeit to varying degrees, to bring into focus how the actions ofeveryday actors are important vehicles for issuing change in the world economy. Westress that exploring this territory does not simply provide new information on how elite actors can do what they do. To an important extent the approach focuses on bottom-up agency, though the extent to which structures of power are also factored in alongside this will vary from author to author as well as more generally between the two major EIPE variants. However, before we set out the two variants of EIPE, it makes sense to begin by outlining the essential characteristics of RIPE.