International Political Economy at the Crossroads

Political Economy as a conscious intellectual exercise has an inextricable link to the ideas of progress and rationalism making their presence felt in human lives with the onset of the project of modernity ¹ . The International Political Economy (IPE) as an intellectual endeavour made a mark from the decade of 1970s; ² however, the writings on political economy can be dated back to the writings of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and a rich legacy afterwards. It was only when the disciplinary segregations were created in the late 19^th century that the tendency to look at economics, politics, sociology, etc. as separate quests began. The realization coming sooner that such compartmentalization was not of much help. The discipline of International Relations (IR) which flourished in the aftermath of the horrors of the First World War, from the very beginning had its focus on the questions of redressing the inter-state conflicts and wars. The theoretical debates within the discipline and the focus on issues of high politics (military conflict and security) have had an overarching presence in the lexicon of IR. However, what is today called as the IPE has gained ground within the disciplinary confines of IR largely (however, as some scholars say that IR should rather be seen within the larger discipline of IPE ³ ) owing to many factors, most importantly being the realization that the foci of study being the state cannot be studied without considerations of the market, that if conflict needed attention, so was the development and these two have to be seen parallelly. Thus, the status that IPE has gained as an area of fertile engagement is based on the realization that the so-called high politics and issues of war, security are not enough to explain the realities and the exigencies of human life. While the Cold War period and its brinkmanship were responsible for this focus of IR, the turn of events and scholarly enterprise in this direction made a mark since the decade of 1970s. What Benjamin J Cohen has very aptly called a consequence of “agency and contingency” behind the rise of IPE as an intellectual arena (Cohen 2008, p. 6). A remarkable set of scholars have been credited in the shaping of IPE as a disciplinary enterprise, most notables among the names being Susan Strange, Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, Robert Gilpin, Charles Kindelberger, Steven Krasner, Robert Cox, and Peter Katzenstein to just name a few ⁴ (Cohen 2008). The task that this paper takes for itself is two-fold. First, to delineate the rich intellectual legacy of International Political Economy within the larger context and discipline of IR and highlight its significance and second, to pose some critiques for the intellectual journey of IPE from two perspectives, the talks of a new world order ⁵ in the last one decade, the challenges that envisioning a new world order brings and a critique from the perspective of the Global South. The paper takes the task of revisiting the seminal work of Robert Cox (1981, 1987, 1996) in the present times and argues that, of the multiplicity of theoretical positionings that the intellectual enterprise of IPE has developed, all of which have significantly enhanced our understanding of states and their functioning, the Coxian lens still provides an unsurpassable way to look at the affairs of the world. ⁶