Critical International Political Economy Research Articles

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.

Whither Regulationism: Reflections on the Regulation Approach

Against the background of ongoing global crisis of capitalism, the article reflects on the most important and intriguing contributions of the French Regulation School within the Marxist tradition to critical international political economy. In particular, it examines and critiques the respective theses of principal regulationists—Aglietta, Lipietz, and Boyer—about capitalist stability, contradictions, dynamics, and relations. Aglietta’s limited conception of crises and contradictions is scrutinised by proposing a framework of agential-structural interrelations—specifically, the interactions between class struggle and market-dependence—in understanding capitalist relations and processes. Lipietz’s level of analysis on ‘national’ capitalism is questioned with a comprehension of the global character and universalising tendencies of capitalism. And Boyer’s reading of finance-led growth as the new regime of accumulation is explored with an argument to put more significance on reproduction than regulation and to bring back production and its interaction with the system of exchange in the analysis of capitalist development. The conclusion proposes a synthesis of regulation approach and the concepts from classical Marxism to better capture the specificities of contemporary capitalist development.

Special Forum on the Millennium Development Goals: Introduction

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight time-bound targets aiming, amongst other issues, to reduce extreme poverty, address school enrollment and the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, expire in September 2015. World leaders, civil society organisations, philanthropists, and the private sector are all frantically negotiating and consulting over what will follow them. This special forum in Globalizations is dedicated to questions which explore the politics of the MDGs, and the subsequent discussions which are framing their successor development framework, the Sustainable Development Goals. Most research into the MDGs tends to be technocratic, addressing issues of how we might achieve the goals better, faster, and more efficiently. Questions of what kinds of societies might be created by the achievement of the goals, and what alternative societies people living in poverty might wish to build for themselves tend to get left aside, as do questions which address the fundamentally capitalocentric logics which underpin the MDGs. This special forum introduction briefly explores some of these issues before introducing the contributors, who include leading scholars on the critical politics and international political economy of international development, such as Suzan Ilcan, Philip McMichael, Kathleen Sexsmith, Carl Death, Japhy Wilson, Anita Lacey, Maia Green, and Heloise Weber.

Of Gardens and Gates in (International) Political Economy: A Rejoinder

Volumes as insightful as Critical International Political Economy: Dialogue, Debate and Dissensus (edited by Stuart Shields, Ian Bruff and Huw Macartney) and Cultural Political Economy (edited by Jacqueline Best and Matthew Paterson) are likely to be read differently by different audiences. The editors’ astute responses thus allow us to better appreciate their original objectives and address their shared concern: a too narrow reading of the volumes. Within the limited space of this rejoinder, I engage with this particular concern to clarify that there is no one right way to think about the global political economy or global political economies in the plural.

Critical International Political Economy and the Importance of Dissensus

This short piece responds to Matthias Kranke’s extended review of our 2011 book Critical International Political Economy: Dialogue, Debate, Dissensus. We reiterate the book’s commitment to challenging disciplinary orthodoxies and immanent critique. The response also observes how the review elides a number of crucial definitions to abrogate our commitment to an expansive disciplinary engagement.

Financing Social Reproduction: The Gendered Relations of Debt and Mortgage Finance in Twenty-first-century America

This article addresses a gap in the international political economy (IPE) literature on housing finance by highlighting the ways in which the deepening of mortgage debt is part of a broader attempt to individualise and (re)privatise relations of social reproduction under neoliberalism. While the extension and deepening of debt has been underpinned by policies and discourses that assume the formal equality of individuals, the attempt to erase the gendered subject in the context of ongoing inequalities in paid labour markets, in asset ownership and in the division of unpaid labour has served to reproduce various overlapping social divisions and inequalities. In linking social reproduction to financial markets, the promotion of homeownership in the US has also rendered the social reproduction of present and future generations increasingly insecure. This work contributes to feminist and other critical IPE debates by highlighting the ways in which accumulation in financial markets has been based on the perpetuation of divisions and inequalities between social classes, between men and women and along certain racial and ethnic lines. It also centralises the role of the state in conditioning these processes.

Where is the study of work in critical IPE?

The British school of International Political Economy (IPE) has been highly innovative in encouraging inter-disciplinary work, revealing – while allowing for – an eclecticism of research and investigation that stands in clear contrast to its American counterpart. Critical theorists in the British school of IPE in particular have been highly prolific in recent years and have introduced research on a wide range of contemporary issues in the global political economy. However, this school tends to overlook two very important areas of analysis: work and employment. More thus needs to be done. This article argues that researchers from seemingly autonomous fields can teach critical IPE a lesson: inter-disciplinarity is not a fantasy. The analysis suggested here is of how governmental policy idealises a particular subjectivity wherein workers are not employed, but are employable. Not only would a focus on this problem enhance existing research in critical IPE: it is also essential if we are to address the needs of humanity in the increasingly unstable and flexibilised world of work. The British school of critical IPE is the forum within which this conversation could and should be continued.

For a critical engagement with aesthetics in IPE: Revitalizing economic imagination in times of crisis

Advanced capitalism is at a historical conjuncture in which aestheticization and financialization combine to intensify and deepen the ‘cult of capitalism’ at the expense of economic imagination. International Political Economy (IPE) is, however, not only poorly equipped to understand the implications of these closely linked transformations, it also avoids considering them by shunning aesthetics. To contribute to the rejuvenation of economic imagination, IPE must explicitly aim at both understanding these processes and their confluences, and engaging with them. Rescue cannot come from orthodox IPE because of its embededdness in the reified ‘Kantian Desire’, which promotes the neglect of recognition in aesthetics and the complexities of human agency under financialization. Critical IPE is more apt at grasping related struggles, which it has shown in for instance research on the financialization of everyday life. Nevertheless, its engagement with aesthetics remains modest and inadequate. Critical IPE concerned with financialization should see it as one of its core tasks to turn to and engage with aesthetics as a means to contribute to critical economic imagination. To this end, the article outlines a critical IPE approach to aesthetics, inspired by Frankfurt School Critical Theory.

The global and gendered dimensions of citizenship, community and ‘cohesion’

In this article we draw upon both critical and feminist international political economy (IPE) approaches in order to interrogate processes of change effecting specific localities in the context of neoliberal global restructuring. We give a closer focus to our interest in the global/local nexus by concentrating on issues of citizenship, community and discourse and practice on community cohesion. After setting out our framework, we develop a critique of community cohesion policies and practices in contemporary Britain. We then briefly review some of the current literature on gender and citizenship paying particular attention to how issues of material inequality, poverty and exclusion currently figure in academic debates. We conclude that gender inequality must be taken seriously if strong and cohesive communities are to be realised and that there is a need for further research that connects critical and feminist IPE to emerging critical literatures on community and citizenship.

The relevance of Nicos Poulantzas for contemporary debates on ‘the international’

This article argues that in many cases the theoretical resources for a revived and enriched ‘critical International Political Economy’ already exist, and we would do well to revisit earlier works when seeking to intervene in contemporary debates. Through an initial engagement with the recent plethora of contributions on ‘the international’, I contend that Nicos Poulantzas’ later writings deserve a rereading. In particular, his work on the historicity of territory and the internationalisation of capital constitutes a series of rich and suggestive commentaries. The significance of his remarks are later illustrated via a consideration of Germany, where I argue that the changes wrought by the growing imbrication of the German economy with transnational circuits of capital have been taking place through, and not necessarily against, the historicity of German capitalism's emergence and evolution.

Re-thinking scales and culture: Rome and the city in and beyond IPE

The article argues that critical International Political Economy can benefit from a trans-disciplinary approach to the role of cities as socio-economic actors in the global political economy. The constitution and exercise of agency is far from an automatic response to the global restructuring of capitalist social relations, but the product of historically and context-specific economic and extra-economic social processes and social struggles. Cities (re)emerge as subjects and objects of governance and intervention and seek to become (dis)embedded in multi-scalar networks of economic and symbolic power. In this process, they become active co-producers of the global political economy, in ways that cut across spatial scales and narrow geographical imaginations.

Accumulating the critical spirit: Rosa Luxemburg and critical IPE

This article introduces Rosa Luxemburg's work on dialectics and the international and argues that its ontological foundations have been neglected within critical International Political Economy (IPE). Whereas other critical Marxists such as Gramsci have played key roles in instigating critical enquiry, Luxemburg's work has largely gone neglected. Although this article acknowledges some serious shortcomings in some of the ‘left infantilism’ inherent within her work, it nevertheless argues that Luxemburg's dialectical ontology significantly contrasted with the orthodoxy that was emerging from Marxist circles at the time. This article explores some of these and argues that the dialectical method that Luxemburg employed to understanding the international provides us with a new avenue for critical IPE to pursue. In particular, it suggests that Luxemburg's articulation of critique provides us with fresh openings that both compliment and add to neo-Gramscian and neo-Polanyian accounts, and allows us to understand trends and practices within the global political economy in new critical ways.

The International as an Everyday Practice

The concept of the everyday is an emerging concept in the field of international studies that has made faint but repeated appearances in the literature for the past ten years (essentially through the medium of ethnographic or autobiographic accounts) and has become a key component of critical International Political Economy. The idea of this forum is to offer a …

The Difficult Relation between International Law and Politics: The Legal Turn from a Critical IPE Perspective

International law is currently undergoing a major transformation that has provoked a ‘legal turn’ in the field of International Relations. At the heart of this transformation are the juridification of international politics and subsequently the judicialisation of international law. This contribution argues that scholars of critical International Political Economy have not yet paid enough attention to this process. What is needed is a theory of international law that is able to grasp the societal implications of this transformation. In a first step some accounts drawing on Antonio Gramsci and Evgeny Pashukanis are presented, with a view to making their theory fruitful for analysing international law. Against the background of an empirical study that compares the global regulation of trade in goods with the trade in services, delivered notably through natural persons, some major shortcomings of these accounts are outlined. The last part of the contribution presents some ideas on how to further develop a critical theory of international (trade) law that introduces a communicative dimension into the legal turn with a view to distinguishing between different extra-economic dynamics.

Neoliberalism and the Rise of the Private Military Industry

In the early 20th century, Georges Clemenceau remarked that war was much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military. In the early 21st century, it is much too profitable. This turn of history is brought into sharp relief by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where US -led military operations are the first in history to be dependent upon private military contractors. In these conflicts, private military firms deliver a wide profile of services ranging from the relatively banal to armed security, tasks previously and nearly exclusively carried out by state militaries. Many in the popular media have seized upon the term mercenary to describe the for-profit activities of private military firms, but the designation is a misnomer. Today, private military firms are integrated into the operations of the world's most powerful militaries and normalized through their transactions on the free market. The market for private military services is considerable and the degree to which the US military has been privatized is so extensive that the viability of US foreign engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan is contingent upon the availability of contracted labour. But it is not for lack of technical capability or uniformed personnel. Rather, private sources of military labour permit US leaders to sell a politically viable war policy to domestic audiences by maintaining low levels of uniformed troop levels.Military privatization in the first decade of the 21st century has elicited pressing new questions and a growing body of academic literature has emerged to address its historical, conceptual, institutional, ideational, and social dimensions.1 Making sense of a booming industry is a challenge and the pace of private military expansion has outpaced scholarly inquiry, leaving a number of issues unexplored. One such area is the relationship between military privatization and broader ideational patterns informing public policy, specifically, economic neoliberalism. This article aims to correct this deficit by exploring the transformative interactions of US military policy and economic neoliberalism. Indeed, inquiries into private military firms in the 1990s address the privatization question, but privatization and neoliberalism are not interchangeable concepts. Privatization is a single institutional strategy in a broader syndrome of policies that constitute economic neoliberalism. This is an important distinction that has gone unnoticed in much of the literature on military privatization and the rise of the private military industry.In the United States, the effects of military neoliberalism run deep, as the figures below will attest. However, the US did not arrive at this state overnight. Military neoliberalism (or neoliberalization, as will be seen) has been an uneven and improvised process, reflecting the real-world limitations of applied neoliberalism and the evolution of the neoliberal ideational framework itself. As will be discussed, the privatization and reregulation of military contracting did not occur in neat and ordered sequences. Different approaches to privatization coexist in uneven and contradictory ways across the US private military industry. More broadly though, military neoliberalism cuts to the core of the Westphalian state itself, revealing fundamental transformations to the indispensable unit of analysis in the academic field of international relations. By situating evolving US military privatization practices within evolving ideational processes, this article aims to explain the relationship between US military policy and neoliberal economic ideology.The article begins with an overview of the scale and cost of contracting in the two major theatres of the war on terrorism, followed by a brief discussion about the limitations of problem-solving approaches to scholarship on the private military industry. This leads to a discussion about theories from the critical international political economy literature that better explain the transformations wrought by military privatization, specifically the theories of the competition state and especially rollback and rollout neoliberalism. …

Critical Discourse Analysis in Comparative Education: A Discursive Study of “Partnership” in Tanzania’s Poverty Reduction Policies

The study of policy in comparative education has been approached using methods associated with the principal social science disciplines that have informed the field since its inception. In particular, the disciplines of history, political science, sociology, and anthropology have had a significant influence on determining the acceptable methods for comparative educational policy analysis, as evident by studies of policy published since the mid-1990s in Comparative Education Review. Given the multidisciplinary orientation of comparative education, it is curious that the discipline of linguistics remains virtually absent from the pages of the field’s flagship journal. This dearth is particularly anomalous today when one considers the interest in critical inquiry as a framework for interpreting the discursive aspects of knowledge production. Such interest makes it an opportune time to consider how one type of linguistic analysis—critical discourse analysis (CDA)—could enhance the comparative study of educational policy. The field of policy studies is a particularly fruitful area in which to explore the critical strand of discourse analysis because policies are, by definition, texts imbued with authority. Broadly constructivist in methodology, CDA asserts that knowledge is socially constructed and shaped by relations of power that are both material and discursive. It rejects the premises of structuralism and, instead, embraces the view that certain meaning systems—or discourses—are privileged by their relationship with dominant groups in society and are, themselves, constitutive of social relations (Rogers 2004). Policies, according to Stephen Ball, are particularly important expressions of social power in that they convey the values of authoritative actors and institutions whose particular forms of knowledge about the social world are reflected in these texts. Ball (1990, 17) utilizes a Foucauldian notion of discourse to explicate this power/knowledge relationship: “Power and knowledge are two

Labour and the Struggle over the Future European Model of Capitalism: British and Swedish Trade Unions and their Positions on EMU and European Co-operation

Based on a critical International Political Economy (IPE) perspective including a strategic-relational approach to the state, this article analyses Swedish and British trade unions' position on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and European co-operation. Importantly, unions in both countries support EMU membership, but transnational British labour is much more in favour of co-operation at the regional level than Swedish transnational labour. While the latter still enjoys good access to policy-making within the Swedish form of state, the former is rather marginalised in Britain and looks to the European Union as an alternative arena for influence. It is further shown that on the one hand British unions continue to reject neo-liberalism. On the other, some transnational sector unions in Sweden have, however, started to accept core neo-liberal concepts.

Refashioning IPE: What and how gender analysis teaches international (global) political economy

ABSTRACT It remains the case that, in spite of the consistently high quality and quantity of gender analysis, gender has not been able to achieve more than a marginal status in International Political Economy (IPE). Increasingly visible as a category of analysis, gender remains trivialized in the minds of both the mainstream and more critical IPE approaches, as a category pertaining only to the lives of women, women's labour rights and women's social movements. This essay therefore analyses what mainstream and critical IPE approaches do and do not say about the constitution of the global political economy. My central argument is that a gender(ed) IPE analysis is absolutely central to fully understanding and explaining the processes and practices of the global political economy, but that the dominant studies and practices of IPE tend not to take into account the contributions of gender based analyses. A critique of the detailed content of gender approaches in IPE is, however, not the main purpose of this review; rather, gender and feminist analyses are the lenses with which to view IPE, with its exclusions, silences and marginalisations, as well as its openings and future paths, not the other way around.

Historicizing Transition: The Polish Political Economy in a Period of Global Structural Change — Eastern Central Europe's Passive Revolution?

This paper develops a critical international political economy analysis of the processes that we commonly understand as globalization and their application in the development of Poland's transition from state socialism. It does so by tracing the rise of social forces shaped by the restructuring of social relations of production and the form of state in Poland. The paper argues that a series of important social shifts occurred to move Poland towards a neoliberal strategy of capitalist accumulation with the failure of state-socialism as a development project and the uncoupling of the social basis of Communist Party hegemony. It is social forces most intimately associated with transnational capital, irrespective of their party or social position, that are most successful in the struggle over competing reform strategies. These strategies eventually coalesce through material and ideological changes associated with a new openness to transnationalized circuits of capital.

You still don’t understand: why troubled engagements continue between feminists and (critical) IPE

Relatively early in the attempts to gender the discipline of International Relations (IR), it was argued by some feminist scholars that it was easier to raise feminist concerns in International Political Economy (IPE) than in IR. However, it has subsequently proved very difficult to articulate these concerns within mainstream IPE, as ‘the neo-realist and neo-liberal frameworks, with their common focus on state-centric issues of co-operation and conflict and their positivist and rationalistic methodologies, do not lend themselves to investigating gendered structures of inequality …’. In contrast, more overlap has been discerned between feminist perspectives and methodologies and the less influential ‘globalist’ (also known as critical/transdisciplinary or heterodox) approaches to IPE than with the dominant statist approaches. This article takes this position as its starting point and will focus on the relationship between gendered analyses and critical IPE (as it will be known here). It therefore does not engage with the undoubtedly important question of how far it is possible or desirable to have a gendered analysis that is not linked to feminism, as within both feminist and critical approaches to IPE an emancipatory agenda is entirely legitimate and even an integral part of those approaches.