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52. Accumulating the critical spirit: Rosa Luxemburg and critical IPE
- Author:
- Owen Worth
- Publication Date:
- 03-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- International Politics
- Institution:
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Abstract:
- This article introduces Rosa Luxemburg's work on dialectics and the international and argues that its ontological foundations have been neglected within critical International Political Economy (IPE). Whereas other critical Marxists such as Gramsci have played key roles in instigating critical enquiry, Luxemburg's work has largely gone neglected. Although this article acknowledges some serious shortcomings in some of the 'left infantilism' inherent within her work, it nevertheless argues that Luxemburg's dialectical ontology significantly contrasted with the orthodoxy that was emerging from Marxist circles at the time. This article explores some of these and argues that the dialectical method that Luxemburg employed to understanding the international provides us with a new avenue for critical IPE to pursue. In particular, it suggests that Luxemburg's articulation of critique provides us with fresh openings that both compliment and add to neo-Gramscian and neo-Polanyian accounts, and allows us to understand trends and practices within the global political economy in new critical ways.
- Topic:
- Political Economy
53. For a critical engagement with aesthetics in IPE: Revitalizing economic imagination in times of crisis
- Author:
- Claes Belfrage
- Publication Date:
- 03-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- International Politics
- Institution:
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Abstract:
- Advanced capitalism is at a historical conjuncture in which aestheticization and financialization combine to intensify and deepen the 'cult of capitalism' at the expense of economic imagination. International Political Economy (IPE) is, however, not only poorly equipped to understand the implications of these closely linked transformations, it also avoids considering them by shunning aesthetics. To contribute to the rejuvenation of economic imagination, IPE must explicitly aim at both understanding these processes and their confluences, and engaging with them. Rescue cannot come from orthodox IPE because of its embededdness in the reified 'Kantian Desire', which promotes the neglect of recognition in aesthetics and the complexities of human agency under financialization. Critical IPE is more apt at grasping related struggles, which it has shown in for instance research on the financialization of everyday life. Nevertheless, its engagement with aesthetics remains modest and inadequate. Critical IPE concerned with financialization should see it as one of its core tasks to turn to and engage with aesthetics as a means to contribute to critical economic imagination. To this end, the article outlines a critical IPE approach to aesthetics, inspired by Frankfurt School Critical Theory.
- Topic:
- Political Economy
54. The relevance of Nicos Poulantzas for contemporary debates on 'the international'
- Author:
- Ian Bruff
- Publication Date:
- 03-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- International Politics
- Institution:
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Abstract:
- This article argues that in many cases the theoretical resources for a revived and enriched 'critical International Political Economy' already exist, and we would do well to revisit earlier works when seeking to intervene in contemporary debates. Through an initial engagement with the recent plethora of contributions on 'the international', I contend that Nicos Poulantzas' later writings deserve a rereading. In particular, his work on the historicity of territory and the internationalisation of capital constitutes a series of rich and suggestive commentaries. The significance of his remarks are later illustrated via a consideration of Germany, where I argue that the changes wrought by the growing imbrication of the German economy with transnational circuits of capital have been taking place through, and not necessarily against, the historicity of German capitalism's emergence and evolution.
- Topic:
- International Political Economy
- Political Geography:
- Germany
55. The global and gendered dimensions of citizenship, community and 'cohesion'
- Author:
- Daniela Tepe and Jill Steans
- Publication Date:
- 03-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- International Politics
- Institution:
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Abstract:
- In this article we draw upon both critical and feminist international political economy (IPE) approaches in order to interrogate processes of change effecting specific localities in the context of neoliberal global restructuring. We give a closer focus to our interest in the global/local nexus by concentrating on issues of citizenship, community and discourse and practice on community cohesion. After setting out our framework, we develop a critique of community cohesion policies and practices in contemporary Britain. We then briefly review some of the current literature on gender and citizenship paying particular attention to how issues of material inequality, poverty and exclusion currently figure in academic debates. We conclude that gender inequality must be taken seriously if strong and cohesive communities are to be realised and that there is a need for further research that connects critical and feminist IPE to emerging critical literatures on community and citizenship.
- Topic:
- International Political Economy
- Political Geography:
- Britain
56. Where is the study of work in critical IPE?
- Author:
- Phoebe V Moore
- Publication Date:
- 03-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- International Politics
- Institution:
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Abstract:
- The British school of International Political Economy (IPE) has been highly innovative in encouraging inter-disciplinary work, revealing – while allowing for – an eclecticism of research and investigation that stands in clear contrast to its American counterpart. Critical theorists in the British school of IPE in particular have been highly prolific in recent years and have introduced research on a wide range of contemporary issues in the global political economy. However, this school tends to overlook two very important areas of analysis: work and employment. More thus needs to be done. This article argues that researchers from seemingly autonomous fields can teach critical IPE a lesson: inter-disciplinarity is not a fantasy. The analysis suggested here is of how governmental policy idealises a particular subjectivity wherein workers are not employed, but are employable. Not only would a focus on this problem enhance existing research in critical IPE: it is also essential if we are to address the needs of humanity in the increasingly unstable and flexibilised world of work. The British school of critical IPE is the forum within which this conversation could and should be continued.
- Topic:
- International Political Economy
- Political Geography:
- Britain
57. Re-thinking scales and culture: Rome and the city in and beyond IPE
- Author:
- Nana Rodaki
- Publication Date:
- 03-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- International Politics
- Institution:
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Abstract:
- The article argues that critical International Political Economy can benefit from a trans-disciplinary approach to the role of cities as socio-economic actors in the global political economy. The constitution and exercise of agency is far from an automatic response to the global restructuring of capitalist social relations, but the product of historically and context-specific economic and extra-economic social processes and social struggles. Cities (re)emerge as subjects and objects of governance and intervention and seek to become (dis)embedded in multi-scalar networks of economic and symbolic power. In this process, they become active co-producers of the global political economy, in ways that cut across spatial scales and narrow geographical imaginations.
- Topic:
- International Political Economy and Culture
- Political Geography:
- Rome
58. Christian 'Renewalism' and the production of global free market hegemony
- Author:
- Kyle Murray
- Publication Date:
- 03-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- International Politics
- Institution:
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Abstract:
- Charismatic and Pentecostal elements of global Christianity serve key roles in the production of free market hegemony within and between states, societies and markets across the world. While many of the institutions of these Christian social forces are fiercely decentralised, this popular global movement has converged on key elements of a shared conception of the world which links core, semi-peripheral and peripheral societies across national boundaries and class distinctions. These activities highlight the necessity of linking the emergent narratives on 'global religious economy' with the larger narratives of Critical IPE. It is argued here that Gramsci provides us with useful conceptual tools with which we may contextualise specific transnational religious movements and social forces within the framework of globalisation and the production of neoliberal hegemony within and between specific states, societies and markets.
59. The relevance of understanding code to international political economy
- Author:
- David M Berry
- Publication Date:
- 03-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- International Politics
- Institution:
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Abstract:
- This article argues that international political economy (IPE) needs to engage in a close reading of computer code. This, I argue, will open up IPE to a very important resource for understanding and explaining many of the forces of capitalism operating today and which are instantiated and reflected within computer code. I also suggest a way in which the 'global', particularly in relation to financial markets and systems, might be read from within the new space of flows represented by computer code and software. There is no doubt at all that software is a hugely important global industry, and that software is critical to the functioning of multinational companies, governments and non-governmental institutions. Therefore, it is curious that so little attention is paid to code itself as an empirical object within IPE. In this article, I want to introduce some of the main contours of the debate and introduce some important concepts for why a close reading of code could be useful to IPE scholars.
- Topic:
- International Political Economy
60. Horsemen of the apocalypse? Jihadist strategy and nuclear instability in South Asia
- Author:
- Andrew Phillips
- Publication Date:
- 05-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- International Politics
- Institution:
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Abstract:
- Since 9/11, counter-terrorism officials have fretted over the possibility of jihadist terrorists obtaining and deploying a nuclear weapon. Although acknowledging that such anxieties are well grounded, I offer here a reconceptualisation of the jihadist terrorist nuclear threat that focuses alternatively upon the remote but real possibility that jihadist terrorists may seek to advance their goals by trying to provoke an Indo–Pakistani nuclear confrontation. Such a confrontation would serve jihadist goals by aggravating religious polarisation on the sub-continent while dramatically weakening the Pakistani state. The system-destabilising consequences of such a catastrophe would likely also offer the jihadists their best opportunity to revive their faltering movement, which otherwise appears fated to terminal decline. In the light of this assessment, I argue that a higher priority must be accorded towards strengthening Indo–Pakistani crisis stability and advancing regional reconciliation if the risk of a jihadist-provoked nuclear exchange is to be minimised.
- Political Geography:
- Pakistan, South Asia, and India