International Political Economy and the Global South

International Political Economy and the Global South provides students from both the Global South and the Global North a textbook that speaks to distinct concepts, categories and issues of International Political Economy (IPE) from a Southern and Northern perspective, while identifying how they differ.

The primary goal is to provide an alternative or complementary reading of IPE derived from the experiences of the periphery. The textbook asks: how has the Global South responded to the demands of a global economy? What is the meaning of sovereignty to those who have experienced colonialism and imperialism? How can the Global South claim the “international” when the Global North sets its norms, institutions and practices? It opens with a standard introduction, offering an intellectual history of key IPE concepts, including state, firm, capital, power, labor, globalization and finance. Each subsequent chapter follows a similar structure: exploration of the problem; discussion of what may be missing from dominant understandings of the problem and/or how orthodox IPE may tell us something different about the problem compared to what is experienced in the Global South; and identification of alternative frameworks and perspectives.

Aiming to de-Westernize and decentralize the production of knowledge, the textbook introduces students to the discipline and phenomenon of IPE with a genuinely global perspective.