Introduction

Abstract

Global Politics in the twenty-first century has brought with it fresh challenges and fresh enquires into the nature and stability of the workings of the contemporary world. In terms of theory, the recent ‘critical’ literature on globalisation and Global Political Economy has led to an extension of the central concepts of core-semi-periphery-periphery that were developed by world-system theorists and by dependency theorists during the Cold-War era of western Marxism. Within these models, great emphasis was placed upon the role of the semi-peripheral state as an agent for change and transformation (Frank, 1966; Wallerstein, 1979; Chase-Dunn, 1989). With the end of the Cold War, the rise of the ‘globalisation’ phenomenon and the emergence of the discipline of International (or Global) Political Economy (IPE) as a distinct field within International Politics, previous ‘statist’ observations became both unfashionable and criticised. Factors such as the rise of neoliberalism and the ‘globalising’ of the economy have led to a new set of critical enquiries (Abbott and Worth, 2002) as well as radical questions about how the international division of labour has emerged in ways that distinctly affect people (see, for example, Moore and Taylor, 2009) not seen in the industrial context of the authoring of World Systems analysis (WSA).