INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

INTRODUCTION
Emerged within the late 1960s and early 1970s, after World War- II, the International Political Economics
or IPE is “the social, political, and economic arrangements poignant the worldwide systems of
production, exchange, and distribution, and also the mixture of values mirrored therein”, as quoted by
Susan Strange (an outstanding IPE scholar).

While, Balaam and Veseth exclaimed it to be “the study of the stress between the market, wherever
people have interaction in self-interested activities, and also the state, wherever those self-same people
undertake collective action”.

In other words, International Political Economy will delineate a study that deals with the interaction of
the economic and political factors at a global level.

IPE AS A FIELD OF INQUIRY

Lucian M. Ashworth said, “one of the most effective ways of disciplining a discipline is to control the
historical narratives that lay out the nature and origins of a field of study”.

The International Political Economy is considered a distinct field of inquiry as there are several well-
known accounts of the emergence of IPE as a field of inquiry. Some of the well-known attempts to
define the terms of International Political Economy are Benjamin J. Cohen's apparent transatlantic
divide, Ben Clift’s, Peter Marcus Kristensen’s, and Ben Rosamond’s critique of IPE ‘origin stories’ based
on published research, Cynthia Enloe’s and Spike Peterson’s gender inequalities and patriarchy theory,
Robbie Shilliam’s and Lisa Tilley’s racial category theory, etcetera.

WHY IS IPE CONCERNED WITH THE POLITICAL DIMENSIONS OF THE ECONOMY?

Although politics and economics have been studied separately for analytic purposes and as
academic disciplines, and although each has its paradigm, theories, and methodologies, it has long been
recognized that economic factors form political selections, and even political factors might have a
decisive influence on the economic decisions.