ABSTRACT
With the recent financial crises in Asia, Russia and Brazil, the resurgence of debate on the ‘management’ of globalisation has thrown into doubt a number of the ‘certainties’ which policy-makers constructed to deal with the ‘uncertainties’ of a post-Cold War, globalising world order. These ‘certainties’ centred around the dominance of the Washington Consensus, the euphoria of ‘globalisation’ and the heralding of an inexorable march towards a truly ‘global’ economy, and the notion of the ‘information age’ and the ‘digital revolution’ which eliminated cumbersome national boundaries and ‘shrunk’ the world into something approximating a ‘global village’. Academic and policy debate, bored with the monotony (and inaccuracy) of this ‘hyper-globalisation’ discourse and, perhaps, with contesting yet again the alleged disappearance of the state, has turned of late towards a ‘restructuring’ agenda: of, for example, the financial architecture, the regulatory role of the national state, global markets, multilateral institutions, and crucially, the conceptual foundations of our understanding of International Political Economy (IPE).
