Introduction

Abstract

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 thought—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 field 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 falsifiable 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 reflect the interests of those in positions of privilege and power.