Conflict, Security, Foreign Policy, and International Political Economy: Past Paths and Future Directions in International Studies

Reflections on the Field of International Political Economy

REFLECTIONS ON THE FIELD OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY Helen Milner Introduction The academic field of international political economy (IPE) is a relatively young one. As an established part of international relations (IR), it rose to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Scholarly writings that would now be called IPE date back much further,l but they were not widely-recognized as part of a distinct field until the 1970s.2 This means that the field is only about thirty years old. The period of oil shocks in the developed countries beginning in the early I 970S provided a strong impetus to the organization of the field. It brought to the fore a set of questions that either had not been addressed in IR before or had been dismissed as unimportant. Concern with these "new" issues energized scholars and prompted the founding of the field. The key questions at that time dealt with five issues central to IR: the use of economic instruments of statecraft, especially relative to military force; hegemonic stability theory and the decline of the United States, or more broadly of the West; the role of domestic politics; dependency theory and development; and the importance of international institutions. The questions that animated the field were ones such as the following: (I) was military force still useful given the new (or renewed) importance of economic resources? (2) had the United States lost its hegemony, especially in becoming so dependent on foreign oil from a group of less-developed countries? 207 208 Conflict, Security, Foreign Policy, and International Political Economy (3) why did the advanced industrial countries, which were fairly similar in their domestic structures and international positions, respond so differently to the oil shocks? (4) were the lesser-developed countries all bound to remain peripheral, dependent economies trapped in low-growth trajectories? and (5) did this period of monetary and real economic shocks elevate the importance of international institutions, such as OPEC, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the International Energy Agency, in world politics ? Since then, research in the area has grown greatly, and the field has become well-established within American and European political science departments.3 However, a number of the issues occupying the heart of the field have changed. As I argue below, hegemonic stability theory has largely faded, and the other issues identified earlier in this paragraph have tal