ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the way that disciplinarity may give rise to interdisciplinary research, which may give rise to multidisciplinary approaches to social scientific problem-solving. It discusses the interdisciplinary connections between international relations (IR) and international law (IL), and the place of multidisciplinary research in global political economy and international economic law. IL theories are more likely to pay attention to the question of legal process, examine the interpretive methodologies used by judges and dispute settlement panelists, examine the normative underpinnings of institutions, and examine the consequences of IL. The chapter gives a few examples to elucidate a point that the fields of political economy and law as they relate to the global economy are better conceptualized as a larger multidisciplinary field of research. Rather than offer a genealogy of interdisciplinary development in International Political Economy (IPE), the chapter shows, through a number of snapshots of both classic and recent literature, the cross-disciplinary potential of the political economy approach.
