ABSTRACT
What is the contribution of international political economy (IPE) to the understanding and explanation of international life? At its most simplistic, IPE can be thought of as the nexus of the political relationships derived from international economic interactions. Yet, IPE is among the most eclectic of disciplines, harkening back to a more unified period of social science inquiry; a period where many contemporary disciplines such as political science, economics, history and sociology were thought of simply as political economy. As a well-defined discipline, contemporary IPE is only a few decades old. However, like our colleagues in the rest of the social sciences, we are also engaged in robust debates about what the discipline is, what questions it should be asking, of what subjects and how they should be investigated? Yet, these divisions obscure a broadly unifying purpose among IPE scholars; understanding the complex social, political and economic relationships flowing from the increasingly indistinct boundaries separating dimensions of world politics. The aim of this chapter is twofold; first, in outlining some of the principle domains of world politics of interest to scholars of IPE and, secondly, highlighting the utility of IPE as a multidisciplinary set of tools for interpreting them.
