ABSTRACT
Three decades or so after the emergence of International Political Economy (IPE) as a branch of International Relations scholarship (Denemark and O'Brien 1997; Gill and Law 1988), the nature, boundaries and intellectual ancestries of IPE are still matters of dispute. At its launch, the Review of International Political Economy invited a number of leading scholars to define IPE as they saw it (Burnham 1994; Hodgson 1994; Krasner 1994; Strange 1994), and their contributions bear testimony to a deeply divided field of study lacking agreement on 'first principles'. Indeed, even the label IPE is under dispute: Gill and Law (1988: xxiii), for instance, prefer the term 'Global Political Economy' (GPE), privileging the global arena over international relationships. Nowadays the two labels are used interchangeably. As will be discussed below, IPE is generally adopted by those who view it as a sub-field of International Relations, whereas GPE is normally the preferred label for those who view it as a transdisciplinary effort, closer to political economy then to International Relations. This book contains the two traditions, hence both labels are used.
