ABSTRACT
Prior to 1970 nobody identified themselves explicitly as an International Political Economy (IPE) scholar. Topics which are now routinely discussed in IPE had a place within the academy, but there was nothing of that specific name to act as a context for bringing all of the discussions together. Accordingly, the most important point to stress in any appraisal of the theories and methods of IPE is perhaps the relative youth of the subject field, which means that its boundaries are still very much open to contestation. Two dimensions of this contest are reviewed in the pages that follow: one over method and whether IPE scholars should seek to align around a single method in the interests of a more homogeneous identity as a subject field; the other over disciplinarity and whether IPE scholars should continue to feel rooted in international relations. Both of these disputes are relevant for the way in which the current volume’s core themes of globalisation, the European Union and multilateralism might be studied from an IPE perspective.
