Conclusion: IPE and the international political economy? IPE or the international political economy?

Abstract

Our intention in bringing together this collection of scholars has been to begin a process of reflection on why volumes such as these are particularly timely in the current period, for both the discipline of IPE and the study of the international political economy. Although the debates on the ‘British’ and ‘American’ schools were an important catalyst for such reflections, they also built upon earlier marginalizations and silencings which were, in our view, unwarranted. Recall, for example, Robert Keohane’s more explicit invitation in the late 1980s to ‘reflectivist’ scholars to produce systematic research agendas and falsifiable claims as a means of engaging with the ‘rationalism’ dominant in IR — in other words, a demand for ‘post-positivist’ research to abandon its raison d’être and engage in narrow specifics which take for granted wider questions about the world in which we live. More recently, the explosion of contributions on ‘globalization’ tended to produce a neat conjuring trick, whereby a globalized world was (magically and tautologically) both the outcome — what needed to be explained — and the explanation of this outcome. In the process, alternative narratives were pushed to the sidelines (Rosenberg, 2000).