Space, the Latest Frontier? A Scalar-Relational Approach to Critical IPE

Abstract

This chapter focuses predominantly on the treatment of the international as a space within International Political Economy (IPE). This edited volume highlights, albeit often implicitly, two areas of concern within IPE. Many of the chapters tend to focus on the relationship between the political and the economic, for example in addressing the relationship between IPE and International Relations (IR). We argue that where the relationship between the political and economic has been the primary focus of debate within the discipline, the analogous question of the relationship between different spaces has been anything but clear. We further argue that in spite of numerous attempts to overcome it, the national-international dichotomy continues to permeate too much of contemporary IPE. We see this as somewhat ironic, given that critical IPE has deliberately positioned itself in opposition to orthodox IPE precisely because of the orthodoxy’s failure to capture the social content or underlying power structures of global capitalism. This is most obvious in those attempts that analyse the historical and social but only include space as a nodal point for analysis of the political agency of capital (compare Morton, 2007b; Underhill, 2003). In contrast we argue that a more nuanced understanding of space as one constitutive element of capitalism is central to the notions of emancipation and resistance which are at the heart of a critical IPE project.