The Routledge Handbook to Global Political Economy

Conversations and Inquiries

Ernesto Vivares, Ernesto Vivares, Ernesto Vivares

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351064521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

The Routledge Handbook to Global Political Economy provides a comprehensive guide to how Global Political Economy (GPE) is conceptualized and researched around the world. Including contributions that range from traditional International Political Economy (IPE) to GPE approaches, the Handbook gathers the investigations, varying perspectives and innovative research of more than sixty scholars from all over the world.

Providing undergraduates, postgraduates, teachers and researchers with a complete set of traditional, contending and regional perspectives, the book explores current issues, conceptual tools, key research debates and different methodological approaches taken.

Structured in five parts methodologically correlated, the book presents GPE as a field of global, regional and national research:

• historical waves and diverse ontological axes;

• major theoretical perspectives;

• beyond traditional perspectives;

• regional inquiries;

• research arenas.

Carefully selected contributions from both established and upcoming scholars ensure that this is an eclectic, pluralist and multidisciplinary work and an essential resource for all those with an interest in this complex and rapidly evolving field of study.

1

Global conversations and inquiries

Ernesto Vivares

GPE: a growing research field

Global Political Economy (GPE) as a research field is expanding, although it is still limited in its scholarly outputs both in the North and South, East and West. Different research contributions in Western countries, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East make this evident (Seabrooke and Young 2017; Shaw 2019; Tussie 2018). GPE and International Political Economy (IPE) have different ontological, epistemological and methodological status. By IPE, the primary referent is mainstream and English-speaking IPE that defines itself as an international American paradigm (Lake 2011), while GPE presents a broader range of pluralistic perspectives and research orientations, to examine development and conflict according to the history and latitude of the themes of study (Helleiner 2015; Hobden and Hobson 2002). Under this pluralist and eclectic categorization, Critical IPEs, Feminist, Critical Geopolitical Economy, Post Colonial and Post Development IPEs, among others, can be considered segments within GPE. Therefore, GPE includes IPE but no vice-versa, as they have different ontological and epistemological standing and research orientations defined by diverse historical, geographical and methodological elements that set in different ways very diverse approaches. That is from empirical positivist OPE to the most radical Post Developmental and Feminist GPEs.

Accordingly, we assume that GPE is not a counter-hegemonic approach in contrast to Western thinking or a means to throw away all done in IPE. Instead, GPE emerges as an ongoing set of conversations and inquiries to the world order from diverse perspectives focused to a significant extent upon the wide conceptual umbrellas of development and conflict. In that sense, GPE may includes all strands of thinking, under the common factor of addressing development and conflict, within the coordinates between politics and economics, domestic and international, in the formal and informal pursuit of wealth and power in the world order (Cohen 2019a; Frieden et al. 2017; Gilpin 1975; Oatley 2018; Shaw et al. 2019; Underhill and Stubbs 2000). There are boundaries that impede to set a unique and universal definition for the field and the essential limitation to consider it as a traditional discipline.

Beyond that, the central concern of IPE and GPE assumed in this Handbook are related to the development of structures and orientations of their scholarship, and the vital task to update and reassess their missions today, as, in particular, IPE still bears the orientations set out four decades ago to explore the liberal world order (Ashworth 2002; de Carvalho 2011; Hobson 2012). Indeed, the central approaches of the English-speaking IPE were developed between the 1970s and 1980s (Cohen 2019a). IPE thus emerged as a subfield of International Relations (IR), bringing into IR the debate about the power of markets and financial globalization. IPE was, however, not an alternative to IR, but a door that broadened the scope of power with wealth, state and markets. The end of the Bretton Woods system, the Cold War and the rise of globalization consolidated the dominant idea that nothing was going to take back the liberal order and its universal standards. In other words, the ensemble among liberal democracy, the market economy and international conduct as standards of civilization (Bull and Watson 1984; Hobson 2013). English-speaking IPE was born within the optimistic limits of the liberal order and was vulnerable to its decline. However, reality changes and, nearly four decades later, we realize that historical responses concerning development and conflict in the international order were already developed in the early eighteenth century in different parts of the world (Helleiner 2015; Hobson 2013). In the 2020s, the mission of IPE is outdated, limited and rather insufficient for GPE, the former showing severe constraints in its scholarship when it comes to comprehending unforeseen changes forty years ago (Lake 2013).

There is a long list of issues that IPE is not prepared to address, and that is due its ontological and epistemological orientations defined to produce knowledge between the formal economy and politics in their links with the international (e.g. trade, finance, institutions, regimes, economic integration and others). Issues such as power transitions and hard tensions between a declining neoliberal order and rising nationalisms remain outside the scope of mainstream IPE. Indeed, mainstream IPE has never claimed to be able to deal with themes such as media manipulating democracies, xenophobia, security conflicts, humanitarian crises, environmental disasters, informal worlds and regionalisms, let alone the uncontrollable technological revolution, and the increasing inequality between countries and within societies. IPE and GPE constitute two different perspectives whose tools and big questions have to converge open and plurally in teaching, learning and research.

At some point, IPE lost its focus on the questions concerning development and conflict in world affairs and became more technological sets that function to explain and justify the liberal political–economic order. Thus, its main strength turned into its major weaknesses today, that is its lack of adaptability and dialogue with other epistemic groups and factions out of the West. Instead of undertaking a search for universal answers, GPE develops scholarship by exploiting the possibilities of pluralistic debates, problematizing realities and widening global inquiries drawing on an eclectic range of tools.

Indeed, these dynamics are experienced by students and lecturers alike who have to deal with opposite and outdated interpretations about what IPE is, narrowing the development of the scholarly. While mainstream approaches can be self-referential and lack dialogue with other perspectives, we can also find a loose sense of how IPE approaches in the Global South are applied and reproduced (Deciancio 2018). Beyond Western approaches, IPE features by epistemic segmentation and, in many cases, parochial orientations in terms of conversations and exchange with the dominant academic communities (Tussie 2018).

The central problem behind dominant interpretations about IPE in the Global South is the tendency to have an insufficient dialogue with inadequate or lack of access to global, regional and developmental voices, for epistemic academic progress. Narrowing the scholarly research even more, in some cases mainstream IPE is still taught as a formal field of study laying in-between two fields of studies, political science and economics (Cohen 2019a). For graduates that is a necessary introduction but for postgraduates it is a poor teaching. Furthermore, it is taught as the study of power within the liberal order on the intersections between states and markets, and the domestic and international (Gilpin 1975: 43). All the abovementioned have been the great tools of IPE up to now but are not enough for teaching GPE and the new world dynamics of development and conflict, wherein we still do not unlock the new transformations and role of power and wealth.

The picture of mainstream IPE is useful, however, as considering the state of world affairs, plagued of unpredicted developments and crises, we need to offer more to students and scholars for teaching, learning and research in GPE. The idea that IPE owns a formal object of inquiry and shares standards to certify specialists and legitimize their research and academic publications is more a definition for specific epistemic communities than for the whole, and does not help (i.e. Cohen 2019a). Even in the Anglo-Saxon IPE that is not present. According to Seabrooke and Young (2017), between five and seven organizational logics at work in IPE can be identified that defines how it is reproduced and how scholars are educated (Seabrooke and Young 2017: 323). Traditional divides in IPE dominate in classrooms, while Western control over the generation of theories or their questioning prevails in the top publications (ibid.).

However, with the production of IPE in other latitudes other than that of the West, similar limitations appear. In the Global South, IPE generally resembles more a global imported and local-oriented, either orthodox or heterodox, field of research about development and conflict but with different tonalities of exchange (Leiteritz 2005; Madeiras et al. 2016; ). There the dialogues with the Anglo-Saxon IPE derivate either in mechanic importations, dependence, hybridizations or even resistances to the epistemic relationship (Tickner 2003; Tickner and Weaver 2009). The barrier in the South is its centrifuge parochialism and segmentation in small factions, generally defined by gatekeepers, their lack of conversations with other epistemic communities and the strong tendency to hydride concepts to explain current political tendencies.

Box 1.1 Conceptual cages

In his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber warned how the successful ideas and projects of one era had been turned into political iron cages of another (2017). According to Weber (2017), the use of certain concepts for current research, removed from their original meaning, and the political purposes given to them by their founders, usually justify the survival and expansion of existing powers rather than explaining social change. Weber calls such historical ideas, namely those with a strong political sense in their orientation of development, “long lasting iron cages” of ideas, derived from rationalized forms of how reality functions in one historical context (2017). The Weberian metaphor might be a useful concept as a basis to identify and analyse the theoretical and methodological elements that are necessary in order to avoid the biases in teaching, learning and research.

Despite limitations, GPE is growing in the Western world, into that beyond the old traditional and peripheral traditions of IPE. For instance, the research of Seabrooke and Young highlights how IPEs are moving towards the contributions of evermore junior scholars (2017:322). Hence, IPE is moving towards multiple IPEs and to the wide field research of GPE, and this Handbook is only part of that evidence. If we consider that the nature and orientation of social knowledge are tied to time, space and social structures, then, it follows that GPE is no different from other fields of social knowledge. It reflects regional and local historical orientations similar or different to dominant Western IPE and GPE perspectives, given their diverse international insertions, orientations and outcomes of developments. Today, we know that IPE and GPE did not start in the Anglo-Saxon world as different research shows, but still, we teach that around a core of academic myths (de Carvalho et al. 2011; Hobson 2013). Evidence demonstrates how international and global political–economic contributions have been raised as historical responses in different parts of the world throughout history (Helleiner and Rosales 2017a, 2017b).

The existence of the Western core mainstream does not necessarily invalidate the presence of other political economic perspectives, as conversations with the world order, based on knowledge process of either import, dependence, hybridization or resistance (i.e. Grosfoguel 2009; Tickner and Waever 2009). On the contrary, Western IPEs would benefit from the opening up of the horizon for a broader and inclusive range of different understandings of IPEs, and this is why the first section of the Handbook is devoted to different ontological and epistemic architectures, research scope and historical shifts of the multiple faces of IPE and GPE.

We need to bear in mind something about GPE. Whatever the orientation of IPE, one concept remains common to all its varied strands and orientations: that is the promise to bring new insights to the comprehension of development and conflict. That is the result of the formal or informal pursuit of wealth and power in the connections between state and market, politics and economics, and international and domestic. All IPEs fall somehow within some part of these ontological coordinates, creating a multiplicity of alternatives for teaching, learning and research that we define here as GPEs. In this Handbook we are rephrasing the study and research of how the political power and wealth production and distribution, formal and informal, have been intertwined throughout world history, in different latitudes shaping international, regional and local orders in terms of development and conflict (Braudel 1979; Payne and Phillips 2010). Exploring one way to globalize the field, Helleiner, for instance, as well other scholars (de Carvalho et al. 2011; Hobson 2013) have evidenced that, in order to engage in a real global conversation, the teaching, learning and research of IPE must review the limited history of North American and European thinking, developing a more global intellectual history (Hobson 2012). Moreover, positively, different contributions identify the significance of the IPE approaches in diverse parts of the world (all quoted by Chin et al. 2014; Helleiner 2015: Özveren 2015; Sartori 2008).

Variations about the teaching, learning and research in IPE and GPE populate the IPE, and usually, they are inundated with different divides such as Realism, Liberalism, Marxism, OPE, North American–British, positivist versus interpretivist methodologies and more. These divisions are reproduced in classrooms and are thus tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Global conversations and inquiries
• PART I: Historical waves and diverse ontological axes
• PART II: Theoretical and methodological perspectives
• PART III: Beyond traditional perspectives
• PART IV: Regional perspectives and inquiries
• PART V: New research arenas
• Index