Description
Critical international political economy (CIPE) refers to a range of intellectual perspectives that challenge the assumptions of “mainstream” international political economy (IPE). Critical IPE can be distinguished from the two dominant mainstream schools of though realism and liberalism on the basis of two related assumptions. First, from an ontological and methodological standpoint critical theorists reject several propositions common to mainstream scholarship: that IPE’s fi eld of enquiry is constituted by real objects and forms of agency which can be treated as objective and separate, rather than historically and socially dynamic, constructed, and mutually constituted; that the principal objective of social science is to identify causal relations and formulate empirically falsifi able predictions about them; and crucially, that empirical research can be separated from normative inquiry. Second, from a normative standpoint mainstream approaches can be considered to be “problem solving” and not “emancipatory” because they take basic socioeconomic and political structures as neutral categories, given and immutable, and the policy recommendations that arise, either implicitly or explicitly, from their analyses remain confined within the context of these structures. Critical theory, by contrast, problematizes socioeconomic and political structures. It considers them potentially transitory and subject to change. As Robert Cox has written, critical theory “does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and whether they might be in the process of changing” (Cox 1981, p. 129). Hence his famous dictum “theory is always for someone and for some purpose” (Cox 1981, p. 128). From the perspective of CIPE, states and markets, institutions and power relations or individuals and ideas, along with their historical, co constitutive evolution, are the site or the engine of political contestation. In this tradition the point of any theory is not simply to understand a world of cooperation and conflict, but also to uncover the ways in which purportedly objective analyses refl ect the interests of those in positions of privilege and power.
The field of IPE has always been an inbuilt vocation within historical materialism, with its explicit ambition to make sense, from a critical standpoint, of the capitalist mode of production as a world system of sometimes paradoxically and sometimes smoothly overlapping states and markets. Marxist and neo-Gramscian scholarship spearheaded the growth of a vigorous critical scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s alongside the development of the discipline of IPE. During the 1980s, constructivist, post-modernist, and feminist approaches gained popularity as Marxism and neo-Gramscian approaches became increasingly marginalized, especially in the USA. However, as a result of real changes in the world, and beginning with the critique of neoliberal globalization in the late 1990s, the return of imperialism/empire as essential categories of debate after the Bush administration’s war on terror, and more recently with the global fi nancial crisis, the strengths of critical theory are becoming more widely recognizable.