Critical International Political Economy Research Articles

Law, knowledge and space: Expertise across the legal geographies of green finance

The mechanisms of green finance are structured and made enforceable through law. However, the legal geographies of green finance are not distributed evenly but are scattered across multiple sites of public and private authority and associated forms of legal expertise. This article investigates how legal technologies and knowledge practices shape the efficacy of green finance. Green finance rests on ‘asset coding’ as a socio-legal practice that is transnational yet rooted in few, salient sovereign jurisdictions and legal templates originating in the social spaces of transnational legal expertise. Through synthesizing literature from political economy, socio-legal studies and economic geography and building on a range of explorative interviews and documents, I suggest that underlying knowledge practices and legal technologies of ‘green asset coding’ contain important continuities with the way assets are coded into capital in conventional finance. This can constrain the efficacy and potential of green finance. The article outlines these continuities across three domains: Energy infrastructures, voluntary carbon markets, and ‘green’ offshore jurisdictions. Taking these continuities seriously invites for further critical international political economy (IPE) research in the nexus between law, finance, and the state, and underscores the need for transformative legal practices to achieve decarbonization at the pace needed.

Towards a trans-inclusive critical international political economy? Or why trans oppression matters for understanding capitalism and social reproduction

Recent scholarship within queer international political economy (IPE) has highlighted the intimate links between sexuality and capitalism, as well as the insights offered by queer approaches to the study of the global economy. This article critically advances this literature by examining the political economic foundations and facets of trans oppression. Against the backdrop of an (anti-) ‘trans culture war’ in the United Kingdom, gender-critical and other transexclusionary feminist discourse has sought to cleave trans people from class struggle and to portray trans activism as separate from, and in conflict with, the goals of the feminist movement. This discourse, I contend, is indicative of a broader lack of understanding about the ways in which trans oppression links to other forms of gender oppression under capitalism. The article argues that feminist IPE, and specifically social reproduction approaches, offer a powerful toolbox with which to illuminate the material bases of gendered, racialised and sexualised inequalities within the global economy, including those experienced by trans people, and to uncover their co-constitutive character. However, theorising trans oppression in/through feminist IPE will require scholars to engage more deeply with queer and trans theorising, specifically accounts of heteronormativity and the body, and to relinquish the cis-normative attachments that shape some accounts of gender, capitalism and social reproduction, notably within the Marxist feminist tradition.

Banks as the new family: the transition from informal to formal borrowing in Turkey

This paper focuses on the impact of social reproduction patterns on borrowing experiences in everyday life, linking two lines of research within feminist and critical International Political Economy (IPE) literature of the everyday, one on social reproduction and debt, and the other on financial subjectivities. Drawing on interviews with women from indebted households in Istanbul, Turkey, it specifically explores how this impact is reflected in the meanings attached to borrowing and the perceptions of what it entails to be a debtor, thereby generating gendered implications. This article reveals that borrowing from family and friends, once seen as an expression of trust and solidarity, is now associated with financial dependence and humiliation, while borrowing from banks is perceived as a means to achieve self-reliance and self-responsibility. However, these meanings contradict women’s self-identifications as debtors, which are framed in moral terms surrounding the structural necessity of incurring credit-debt for social reproduction. This paper contributes to political economy scholarship by addressing how the everyday lives of the indebted are linked to the broader global financial system, mediated by the specific conditions of a Global South context (Turkey) characterized by subordinate financialization, the political use of credit expansion, and a neoliberal/conservative gender regime.

The Losing Battle Against Neoliberal Trade Agreements in Latin America: Social Resistance Against the MTA Between Ecuador, Peru, and the European Union

AbstractThis article studies the influence of the antineoliberal social movements in Peru and Ecuador in the face of the Multiparty Trade Agreement (MTA) between both countries and the European Union (EU). To identify and analyze this influence, a transdisciplinary theoretical framework was created, integrating debates and concepts from social movement theory and critical international political economy. In Peru, the movement used European allies to establish their demands on the EU’s agenda, which resulted in increased pressure on the government to enforce labor rights and environmental standards. In Ecuador, the movement was able to establish food sovereignty and the rejection of free trade in the national constitution. As a result, the negotiations with the EU were delayed and Ecuador achieved certain exceptions in its adhesion protocol. Nevertheless, both movements were unable to maintain their influence, due to political and socioeconomic dynamics on the domestic and global levels.

Mobilising critical international political economy for the age of climate breakdown

ABSTRACT Globally accelerating environmental breakdown necessitates a large-scale mobilisation not only of the natural and engineering sciences, but also of insights generated from social sciences. Consequently, recent interventions in International/Global Political Economy (IPE) demand a gearing of the field towards putting climate breakdown centre stage. We respond to this call by drawing attention to the role critical IPE approaches can offer to the field to engage with climate breakdown more comprehensively and consistently. We argue that critical IPE can do so by combining problem-driven and praxis-oriented emancipatory perspectives, leading to systematic and concrete research programmes that are indispensable in the age of climate breakdown. We support our argument by documenting and systematising this potential across three core IPE themes:economic growth, state theory and global finance. In order to unlock its full potential for centring climate breakdown, we argue that critical IPE should better embrace multidisciplinarity and intersectional approaches, and produce more empirical work and methodological advances in future research.

Disciplinary Neo-Liberalisation and the New Politics of Inequality

AbstractOverlaps exist between critical Criminology and critical International Political Economy (IPE). However, while criminologists are keen to engage with political economy, there has been less interest in criminology from scholars in IPE. Recently, though, a literature started to emerge within IPE that focusses on discipline, including research which focusses on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ yet without explicitly engaging with the criminological literature. This paper engages with criminological research to demonstrate areas of shared interest, particularly in understanding the role of discipline and consent in the structuring of the ‘social ensemble’ thereby offering something of a corrective to the literature on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’. We argue that combining insights from Gramscian and (critical) Feminist social theory can help to explain the social reproduction of ‘hegemony’ in which discipline – including self-discipline – plays an important role. Long-term trends in the fracturing of the hegemonic post-war social ensemble were displaced by temporary ‘fixes’ related to consumerism, credit and discipline (including in state institutions, changing economic and ideological structures). However, in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 – the limits of these fixes are revealed and social polarisation is the result. In this context, disciplinary processes in and beyond state institutions are becoming more visible.

From fear to siblinghood, compassion and love: the role of faith communities in the time of the coronavirus pandemic

This article presents the argument according to which pandemics have always affected the human society, the current COVID-19 being the latest of the series of health crisis that affects humankind. The objectives of this paper were fourfold. First, it traced the development of global epidemics that have plagued the world, drawing lessons from classics in fiction and non-fiction literature. Second, it investigated the impact of the current pandemic on human lives today. Third, it examined the role of the churches and faith-based groups individuals in response to the needs of the people during the pandemic. Fourth, it laid down further tasks that need to be undertaken during this health crisis. Critical international political economy, deep ecology, eco-centrism and the human rights-based approach guided this research. An Asia-wide ecumenical fellowship of national councils and churches served as the case study. Specifically, it investigated the ways in which the churches responded to the pandemic in relation to migrant workers and food security.

Globalization and privatization of education in Honduras—Or the need to reconsider the dynamics and legacy of state formation

ABSTRACT While much literature has been produced on globalization, privatization, and the State individually, it has not been common to treat them together, at least not in the field of comparative and international education. There is excellent work that has documented the ways in which globalization and privatization have influenced education reform, but extant scholarship typically has not engaged with theories of the State. In this paper, through the case of Honduras, we explore the aforementioned issues. First, we draw on the approach of Critical International Political Economy (CIPE) to understand the ways that (political-economic) globalization and privatization have affected and manifested in both policymaking and the provision of education. The second half of the paper then turns the gaze back on the Honduran State and draws on State theory literature to consider why globalization and privatization have been able to be so influential in the first place.

The Discursive Construction of Europe in Italy in the Age of Permanent Austerity

AbstractCombining a Critical International Political Economy theoretical perspective with Critical Discourse Analysis, the article explores, from the late 1980s to present and across the party‐system, the characteristics of the discursive construction of Europe in Italy as a source of legitimation and naturalization of the country's permanent fiscal adjustment and economic restructuring. Through an original analysis of the official policy documents enacted by Italian governments, I show that the resort to Europe and 'risanamento' (permanent fiscal adjustment) are discursively constructed, by domestic political forces, as legitimating strategies to tackle fiscal profligacy and restore growth, notwithstanding the fact that in Italy (1) primary state budget has been in surplus from the early 1990s, (2) economic growth has been mediocre since the 1990s, and (3) social inequalities and macroeconomic imbalances have risen sharply, especially after 2008 crisis due to prolonged austerity measures. Furthermore, in contrast to the literature that sees Italian Europeanization as a pathway of virtuous economic and political change favoured by supranational integration, I argue that the discursive strategies developed by Italian political elites to legitimate change in national political economy should be broadly conceived, and analysed, as organic to neoliberalism and austerity as international hegemonic projects.

Neoliberalization, fast policy transfer and the management of labor market services

Neoliberalism has been a core concern for international political economy (IPE) for several decades, but is often ill-defined. Research offering greater definitional clarity stresses the role of contingent and local level factors in diverse processes of neoliberalization. This paper contributes to that literature, addressing a surprising gap in critical IPE knowledge; the management practices by which pressures to activate the unemployed and to make them more competitive, are implemented. The paper suggests that performance management is significant as both a depoliticizing policy coordination mechanism and a highly politicized policy implementation practice. The paper invokes a scalar-relational approach which sees the pressure to innovate and compete at lower scales as driven by the political economy of competitiveness at the system scale. The paper reports on research undertaken within the empirical frame of EU meta-governance, showing how performance management is part of lower-scale attempts to adapt to system-scale pressures. It is neoliberalizing in both form and content. It concludes by showing that while performance management may be a significant component of neoliberalization there is scope for engagement and contestation motivated by egalitarian ideals. Critical IPE scholars interested in contesting neoliberalization should therefore engage with the political economy of management practice as well as policy design.

Security and Petroleum Resources: An Analysis of Factors Associated with Persistent Conflict in Nigeria, Niger Delta

This paper is an attempt to critically examine global energy geopolitics and the factors associated with persistent and resilient conflicts in Nigeria, Niger Delta. Adopting the critical international political economy approach, the paper argues that most of the strategies aimed at restoring lasting peace and development in the oil producing communities of the Niger Delta are largely an incentive for insurgency, a reward for crime and a vicious cycle, aimed at benefiting the political elite without any real development for those that actually need it in the oil-rich region. If development intervention program of the state and multinational companies must work, it has to go beyond just huge revenue allocation or the symptomatic action of pacifying militants and take a holistic approach using the examples of countries like Norway, United Arab Emirate and Kuwait. The Niger Delta oil producing communities should look beyond continuous agitation for increasing revenue allocation, to include accountability from its leaders who are largely engaged in financial improprieties and corruption.

Development Failures in Ghana, Development Miracles in Asia: Whither the Africa Rising?

Abstract In the 1960s, the economic development of African countries such as Ghana was on par with Asian countries like South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia. Fast forward to the 2000s and a totally different picture emerges: Ghana lagged far behind its Asian counterparts in most development indicators, something that exemplifies the broader case of postcolonial African states unpropitious of development. Paradoxically, a new intellectual fad has emerged in the 2000s claiming ‘Africa is rising’, potentially, to replicate the development model of the Asian tigers. This discourse is based mostly on spurts of economic growth of African countries rich in natural resources like oil and gold, a growth driven by a spike in world market prices of these commodities in the second decade of the 21st century. When the world prices of these commodities plummeted precipitously a few years later, countries like Ghana, cited as signal examples of the ‘Africa rising’ mantra, went into deep economic crises. The IMF had to bail them out. Meanwhile, despite the global economic downturn, Ghana’s Asian counterparts managed to muddle through, still far ahead of it in most indicators of development. In contrast to the Africa Rising discourses, this paper draws on the insights of critical international political economy to leverage our understanding of the contrasting development paths African states and their Asian counterparts have taken in the immediate postcolonial period; and more recently, the period following immediately after the global economic downtown. Despite its weaknesses, indeed, despite the refutation of its cruder claims, we argue that dependency theory is still rich with useful analytical insights that can unravel the African development paradox in the 21st century vis-à-vis the development miracle of the Asian tigers.

Economic Liberalism and the State: Dismantling the Myth of Naïve Laissez-Faire

ABSTRACTThe article offers a critique of the prevailing understanding of the relationship between neoliberalism and classic nineteenth-century liberalism in contemporary international political economy (IPE) and offers a redefinition inspired by Polanyi and Gramsci. Within critical IPE studies, a consensus has emerged that neoliberalism cannot be reduced to a simple attempt to roll back the economy and let loose free-market forces. However, this insight relies on contrasting neoliberalism with a classic liberalism, that is, a simple attempt to implement just this naïve laissez-faire ideology. In contrast, this article argues that nineteenth-century liberalism is also characterised by an active use of state and legislative power. Through a historical study of two cases from nineteenth-century Britain, Poor Law reform and the Gold Standard, the paper will argue that state action played a central role even during the heyday of laissez-faire liberalism. With a starting point in Polanyi’s dictum that ‘laissez-faire was planned’, this reinvestigation will point towards a need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the distinctions between economic theory, ideology, and practical policy, as well as pointing towards a general reinterpretation of the role of the state in liberal economic ideology.

Money power of Capital and Production of ‘New State Spaces’: A View from the Global South

ABSTRACTAn array of innovative financial and monetary institutional and policy initiatives recently emerged across the Global South at various spatial scales: (1) the deployment of national ‘self-insurance’ strategies such as large foreign reserve accumulation, different forms of capital controls, and currency market interventions; (2) the multiplication of bilateral, sub-regional, and regional financial and monetary mechanisms, including currency swaps and reserve-pooling arrangements, credit lines, bilateral aid, and development finance; and (3) a growing participation and assertiveness in multilateral financial arrangements. After critically reviewing the existing literatures – the international political economy (IPE) of ‘policy space’ and the IPE of ‘financial statecraft’ – the paper deploys a ‘scalar-relational’ critical IPE approach and interprets these policy initiatives in terms of a crisis-driven production of ‘new state spaces’ across the Global South, in the context of the current period of credit-led capital accumulation. The paper argues that this process has been characterised by the contradictory extension, intensification and growing complexity of the tasks taken on by the capitalist state at various scale levels, resulting in the increasing entanglement of state power in the nested hierarchy of monetary relations, from the global scale to bodies and subjectivities.

Why have China and Russia become Uzbekistan’s biggest energy partners? Exploring the role of exogenous and endogenous factors

In the 1990s, there was an expectation that Uzbekistan, along with other countries in Central Asia, would gradually move towards the West by distancing itself from the sphere of Russian influence. However, in spite of the West’s significant investment in the region’s economies and attempts to enter the local markets through both bilateral and multilateral channels, this shift never materialised. In fact, since the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Uzbekistan’s trade cooperation with Russia has remained robust, and only in 2014 did China overtook Russia as Uzbekistan’s biggest trading partner. This article aims to understand why Russia and China have become Uzbekistan’s biggest economic partners, especially in the energy sector. To understand this, I believe that it is important to analyse the nature of both domestic and international factors and their interaction. First of all, there are international factors: globalisation, the rise of China and an increase in global demand for natural resources; the role of the China-initiated the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Silk Road Economic Belt; and Russia’s attempt to reclaim its “great power” status since 2000 and Putin’s attempt to build and expand the Eurasian Economic Union. Second, there are domestic factors: understanding Russia’s and China’s foreign trade policy linked not only with economic growth but also with the structure of foreign economic policy decision-making, or “power vertical,” among other domestic elements. This article will draw on Critical International Political Economy (CIPE) to argue that this tradition is well equipped and offers an important framework to understand foreign economic policy of powers such as Russia and China. The CIPE does not simply combine the domestic and international factors but also insists on their indivisibility and engages with cultural, ideological and social elements in their historical contingency.

Passive revolution revisited: From the Prison Notebooks to our ‘great and terrible world’

Building on the recent fertile season of studies on passive revolution, this article argues for the (re-)increasing relevance of the concept in these times of capitalist crisis. However, it is also argued that this renewed relevance should be predicated on a narrower definition of passive revolution than the one generally used in recent debates in critical International Political Economy. Returning to the Prison Notebooks, four elements are identified here as the conceptual core of passive revolution, to which Gramsci’s admittedly varying uses of the phrase are implicitly anchored: an international precondition determining the necessity of restructuring on the national scale, a domestic precondition determining the specific form of this restructuring, a specific method through which passive revolution is effected and a specific outcome which entails achieving the passivity of subaltern classes through the partial fulfilment and simultaneous displacement of their demands. Thus redefined, passive revolution becomes a valuable instrument for grasping the challenges facing the emergence of a subaltern bloc in the current organic crisis of capitalism.

Political Economy of Banking and Debt Crisis in the EU: Rising Financialization and its Ramifications

This paper is structured into four different parts. In the first part the authors analyze the origins of banking and debt crisis in the EU. The state and the evolution of the EU banking sector before the crisis and in its immediate aftermath is analyzed in detail in order to dispel the myth of the existence of an exclusively debt-induced crisis. This part also introduces the notion of financialization into the analysis. The second part analyzes the crisis-related dynamics by using endogenous monetary theory and makes particular use of balance-sheet recession as a concept. The third part introduces political consequences of the banking and debt crisis in the EU by focusing on the political crisis of legitimacy and its impact upon the EU integration process. In order to deal with this topic the authors borrow several concepts from critical international political economy such as transnational elite, knowledge production, and hegemony. We posit a close link between actions of the European transnational elite, crisis origins, and their ramifications. The fourth part focuses on the two most-discussed policy solutions in tackling the crisis: the banking and the fiscal union as well as their feasibility. Additionally, it lays out some fundamental trillemas for creating a viable way out of the crisis which are unfortunately often neglected in public debate. The main argument refers to the growing impact of financialization in the EU and its detrimental effect on the potential for integrated, stable, and prosperous EU economies. The authors explain the changing social, political, and economic landscape and evaluate the main challenges and obstacles to economic and political governance in the EU. The paper is concluded with some heterodox policy recommendations for overcoming them. JEL classification: B52, E51, E52, F34, F50, G01, G20, P48

Leila Simona Talani and Simon McMahon (eds.) Handbook of the International Political Economy of Migration Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2015. viii + 439 p. $225.00.

The focus of this book is on the conditions of entry and exit of economic migrants, both legal and illegal. Its perspective is that of international political economy (IPE). In the context of migration, this encompasses the realist tradition in political science in which migration outcomes are governed by states or by interest groups within them, (neo)liberal institutionalism with its emphasis on regulation of migration by international institutions, and the “globalization thesis” that envisages looser controls on mobility as an inevitable accompaniment of an ongoing weakening of state sovereignty and national ties. The first, theoretical section of the volume, although subtitled “Towards an International Political Economy of Migration,” offers a less than cogent account of this territory. Its chapters cover state regulation of migration, transnational migration and global governance, the requirements of an ethical mobility regime, human trafficking, and migration effects of urban transformations. The IPE approach (and a sub-category, critical IPE) seems to be essentially defined by the migration studies of political scientists. A second part, on the economic dimensions of migration, contains more focused essays on international labor migration, guestworker regimes, migration effects on welfare states, migrant remittances, and migration provisions in trade pacts. Finally, a third section consists of case studies of aspects of the political economy of migration in the European Union, the Middle East, North America, and Southeast Asia, with particular attention to regional integration. An outlier in this part is a paper on Cairo, depicted as a global city with a large migrant-swollen informal labor market entrenching a social hierarchy with varying degrees of citizenship. The editors and most of the contributors are from British and other European universities. Chapter bibliographies, index.

Everyday Life as Critique: Revisiting the Everyday in IPE with Henri Lefebvre and Postcolonialism

This article argues that critical International Political Economy (IPE) has used an undertheorized notion of everyday life and that Henri Lefebvre’s approach to everyday life, when augmented by attending to specifically colonial modes of domination, provides a necessary theoretical basis for IPE to engage with the everyday. It thus explores the connections between critical IPE, the critique of everyday life, and postcolonial thought. It begins by examining the “turn” to the everyday in IPE, examining the consequences of its reliance on an untheorized notion of the everyday. Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life is then examined to address these shortcomings. But Lefebvre’s provocation about the colonization of the everyday also requires greater conceptual clarity. Thus, the article goes on to examine the affinities between postcolonial thought and the critique of everyday life. This underscores the indispensability of Lefebvre’s critique in terms both of everyday life and of the international as constituted by colonization.

Two regionalisms, two Latin Americas or beyond Latin America? Contributions from a critical and decolonial IPE

This article reconsiders the hegemonic interpretation of Latin American regionalisms, which have been defined as expressions of the fragmentation power of ideologies. After identifying the main bias and limitations of this approach, two alternative analytical proposals are presented: critical International Political Economy (IPE), which reconsiders the region’s heterogeneity as the reflection of a variety of historical trajectories; and the increasingly influential Latin/Latin American modernity/coloniality approach, which re-authorises the voices of a multiplicity of ‘marginal’ subjectivities to the cognoscible world of international studies.