ABSTRACT

International Political Economy (IPE) is recognized today as a sub-discipline of International Relations. It is an interdisciplinary approach to international life that favors the study of both economic and political interactions on a global scale. IPE has been heavily developed especially in American, British, Canadian and European universities during the last three decades. The relatively young subdiscipline is based on the work of Robert Gilpin, Robert Keohane, Charles Kindleberger, Joseph Nye, Susan Strange and Robert Cox, whose research attempts to harmonize international economic and political relations.2 It emerged in the 1970s, when new conceptual instruments were needed to explain the evolving international environment characterized by economic events with strong political implications.