ABSTRACT
International relations stands as the one social science with barriers to entry so low that anyone can jump them. It has been and will remain the richer for keeping those barriers low. (Strange 1988)
Introduction
International Political Economy (IPE) has traditionally been viewed as a subset of international relations (IR). Its domain of research was generally perceived as international economic affairs, such as trade negotiations and economic sanctions. Ultimately, the paradigm was state centric: IPE was the study of the international economic activities of nation states. This perception dominated international relations literature from the discipline's emergence in the post-World War I era. It was only in the latter part of the 20th century that orientations began to change. Fuelled by the research of a handful of lateral-thinking intellectuals, IPE came to embody much more than state-state economic relations, challenging the realist assump tion that states were all that mattered in the international system. First markets and then firms emerged as important international actors, as did other non-state players. International power resided not with or in states per se but rather in a set of global power structures. Certain states could shape the nature and direction of international relations through controlling access to these power structures. For example, the United States emerged as a global heg emon in the post-World War II era in part because US companies were at the forefront of new technological developments such as the invention of the microchip. Through its preferential access to this new meta-technology, the US government exercised structural power and therefore possessed relational power relative to other
governments. This new way of perceiving international relations revolutionized the discipline.
