The statements made and opinions expressed in this publication are solely the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Security in Context network, its partner organizations, or its funders.
1) Why did you decide to write this book?
When we got together to write a textbook on the International Political Economy (IPE), we wanted to express our frustration with how the topic is overwhelmingly presented as a matter of state policy. Our mission was to bring the social analysis back to IPE. The main impetus for us was to address a set of questions that we felt were unanswered in the prevailing textbooks that cover this discipline: how did communities around the world adapt to and influence structural changes of the global economy? How do foreign non-state actors impact domestic policy making? How can we explain the connection between the Global North and Global South positionalities? One of the main issues for us was the extent to which IPE is taught from a Western lens, taking for granted that states, markets, and capital encompass more or less the same sets of phenomena across the world, presenting them as eternally fixed concepts and ideas. But in reality, historical contexts always needed to be taken into consideration in order to understand how relationships to capital vary across societies and political regimes as they shape how inputs to goods and services would be valued. Consider property rights, or how land is valued or used, or food regimes: these dynamics are historically constructed according to the nature and functioning of states and of foreign intervention.
The discipline is usually taught with a focus on Western Europe and American transformation over the last two centuries, with any international changes taking place through that lens. Recent years have contributed to advancements in IPE with studies now increasingly centered on the experience in the Global South, with South South economic and political cooperation and regionalization (for example, ASEAN, the African Union, and CARICOM).
For us, the notion of Global South does not denote political unity, but a global space characterized by its political and economic peripheralization (as Immanuel Wallerstein would say) in the world economy, but also a set of political possibilities which emanate from states in the Global South exercising their agency in the context of pressures and constraints by a global order.
Our focus on IPE and the Global South joins a storied tradition of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist critique, initiated by the works of Samir Amin, Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi that demonstrate that the Global South is a dependent and subordinated political space with enduring colonial legacies. Yet we also recognize the need to shift the positionality of economies and polities from victimhood (needing or lacking development) to political agency.
2) Each of the authors comes from a different discipline, what value did this bring to the book?
The importance of interdisciplinarity drove our project. Adriana is an anthropologist, Giuliano comes from political ecology, Bashir works with political philosophy, and Z is our international relationist. IPE is pervasive to understanding all our different perspectives and that attests to the centrality of IPE in understanding various social phenomena like culture, agrarian movements, genealogy, and global governance.
The book explores eight themes of IPE: value, food, labor, globalization, migration, finance, security, and social movements. These themes represent central discussions of IPE, such as labor and finance, but we also wanted to put at the center some discussions that are less connected to IPE such as security and social movements.
In our introduction, we briefly present key insights from the major schools of IPE – i.e. liberalism, Marxism, and Mercantilism – on the goals and problems of IPE (pp. 5-7). We then highlight how, in the case of the Global South, a concern for sovereignty and policy adequacy, more than growth and development, is key and thus differs from mainstream scholarly perspectives.
The book engages critically with the discipline in an attempt to constructively de-westernize and decenter its core interests by proposing to:
1) historicize the processes that shape the global political economy today;
2) recenter IPE on the political and economic experiences of countries in the Global South;
3) adopt a series of interdisciplinary and qualitative research methodologies in order to pluralize IPE methods and theories to ground analysis in the non-western intellectual traditions and non-western spaces;
4) contribute to redrawing linkages between the global and the local.
In a nutshell, the book tries to decolonize IPE.
3) Can you tell us more about some key discussions of the book?
One way to explore the relation between IPE and the Global South is through the prism of food. Take for example the crisis of staple food prices of 2021 which coincided with the beginning of the Russian Ukrainian war and which rang alarm bells across the food import-dependent MENA region. One may ask, why has there been a food crisis? Broadly, three IPE answers are possible: 1) Food crises result from a Malthusian problem of population; 2) food crises come from the region because it is lacking water; 3) food crises result from malfunctioning governance of global value chains.
Our food chapter further answers that question by historicizing the political economy of international food regimes, and discussing how the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has been progressively incorporated in stages of the international food regime. The notion of the international food regime, developed by Harriet Friedman and Philip McMichael, links agriculture to state formation and capital accumulation in the early development of capitalism as a socio-historical system on a global scale. Going through the colonial, industrial, and corporate food regimes, one finds out that agriculture and land in the MENA region have been transformed starting from the colonial period when an international division of labor tied Europe to the MENA region to feed the industrial expansion and changing consumption patterns in Europe. Egypt, Turkey, and Iran were the centers of cotton cultivation in the 19th century. Wine was produced in the Levant, tobacco in Turkey and Syria, and silk in Mount Lebanon (Woertz, 2014).
New land property regimes, land dispossession, and pockets of cash crops for exports started to characterize the region. The colonial intervention spearheaded the uneven penetration and establishment of private property regimes, promoting patterns of land tenure that served the interests of the British, French, Italian, and Ottoman colonial interests (Bush, 2016).
The subsequent food regime (1940s to 1970s) was characterized by the completion of the nation-state system following the decolonization process. It was based in a transnational restructuring of the agro-sector with intensive meat production and the durable food sectors as central components, often supported by subsidies (Friedman & McMichael, 1989).
This “wheatification” of diets in the MENA is an outcome of Western influence, trade policies, and international markets. Food aid, in other words, stimulated the dependency on wheat imports while cereal aid remained high over the 1970-s to 1980s. Agri-food systems, consumption patterns and diets in the Global South have been shaped by their adverse integration in the capitalist world economy and the stages of the international food regime.
- The globalization of food value chains, food aid, and the liberalization of trade in global agricultural commodities further transformed patterns of food production, consumption and import/export.
- Seen from the MENA region, the state of acute food insecurity and dependency does not emanate from Malthusian imbalances between demographic growth and agricultural productivity, nor from allegedly “natural” causes such as scarce water and poor yield of farmland. They rather emanate from a long historical process of incorporation of the region within the capitalist economy, and of subordination to its core mechanisms of extraction and capital accumulation, first through colonialism and then across the post-independence and neoliberal epochs.
4) Who is the book targeting as an audience?
The book is meant as an introduction to IPE for undergraduate and graduate students of international studies and international relations (IR). Each chapter opens with a “hook” to the topic, such as an anecdote about the topic of the chapter. Then, we delve into the peculiarity of the Global South context to understand the topic. The chapters are also guided by questions that can help instructors test students’ understanding in class discussions or course examinations. There are various box cases, which are case studies relevant to the themes discussed. The work cited in the chapters aims to connect IPE to other disciplines including sociology, history, and anthropology. We also bring in voices of scholars from the Global South in our bibliographic references.
5) Who else other than IR students would benefit from this book?
The book is primarily addressed to students, researchers, and scholars in the social sciences interested in a multi-disciplinary engagement with the field of IPE. In addition, the book is also an important read for anyone interested in the affairs of the Global South. Analysts, journalists, development practitioners, policy-makers, and community-organizers and activists in the Global North or South could benefit from this book’s insightful talking points to our lived power dynamics.
6) Any concluding thoughts?
Our positionality as authors implicated with the Global South (the Levant, the Caribbean, North Africa, and East Africa) gives us authority to speak from the Global South perspective in some of its plurality. We hope that our approach will contribute to pluralizing knowledge production and inspire cooperation between scholars from different geostrategic backgrounds and carrying different struggles.
And please consider getting our book: https://www.routledge.com/International-Political-Economy-and-the-Global-South-Perspectives-from-Africa-Asia-Latin-America-and-the-Middle-East/ElBernoussi-Garriga-Lopez-Martiniello-Saade/p/book/9781032205748
References
Bush, Ray. “Agrarian transformation in the Near East and North Africa: Influences from the work of Lionel Cliffe”. Review of African Political Economy 43 (sup1), 69-85, 2016.
Friedman, Harriet and Philip McMichael. “The rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present”. Sociologia ruralis 29 (2), 93-117, 1989.
Woertz, Eckart. “Environment, food security and conflict narratives in the Middle East.” Global Environment 7 (2), 490-516, 2014.
