ABSTRACT
The opening to cultural differences in international political economy/development is presented in academic circles as a disciplinary breakthrough. This chapter argues that an international political economy/development otherwise which leads to a ‘different place’, a different ‘beginning’, and ‘to spatial sites of struggles and building rather than to a new temporality within the same space’. A Cultural Political Economy (CPE) keeps the focus on the regulatory mechanisms within capitalism, while decentring the role of the state and reinstating the role that semiotics plays in the reproduction and transformation of capitalism. An Ethnological Political Economy (EPE) values noncapitalist economies according to capitalist standards. The search for oppositional political economies conducted by Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers an interesting contrast to both CPEs and EPEs. The chapter shows that adopting a decolonial perspective broadens both the scale and the scope of the critique of capitalism/modernity/coloniality, and also increases the availability of economic/development imaginaries.
