ABSTRACT
Transnational historical materialism departs from mainstream approaches to International Political Economy (IPE) on two fundamental terrains. First, it breaks with the state-centrism that remains a core assumption in most writings on IPE from a mainstream perspective. In the debate between neorealist (or neomercantilist) and pluralist (or neoliberal) approaches about the relevance of non-state actors, the ontological primacy of the state is not in question. In that
sense both these currents of IPE thinking can be said to be state-centric. In contrast, transnational historical materialism identifies state formation and interstate politics as moments of the transnational dynamics of capital accumulation and class formation. This also implies that the national-international dichotomy (so central to mainstream theories of IPE) is seen as subordinate to the dynamics of social relations.
