The theme of China’s relations with Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) may be analyzed across three distinct phases. The first is 1949–1978, which entailed the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to reach out economically to LAC in its pursuit of raw material inputs; the CCP also made political gestures toward leftist parties in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico; and there was considerable sociocultural interaction between the two. The second phase spans 1979–2000, which encompasses the first 2 decades of economic opening and structural reform in China. The LAC scenario during this time was one of economic volatility as well as a transition to democracy in a majority of countries. Economically, LAC’s debt-riddled “lost decade” of the 1980s gave way to the Washington Consensus in 1990, based on policies of liberalization, privatization, and deregulation. Similar to China’s reform thrust, LAC policymakers sought to incorporate the market more assertively into their respective economies. A third phase began in the wake of China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). As China gained market access to the entire WTO membership, its demand exploded for those raw materials needed to ratchet-up the country’s export-led manufacturing strategy to produce more sophisticated and higher value-added products. Within this third phase, the main highlights of China–LAC relations in the 21st century included the following: positive economic shocks and aftershocks; China’s public diplomacy and foreign policy toward LAC; China–LAC “Strategic Partnerships;” and the so-called triangle with the United States. The article concludes with a final tally on LAC progress vis-à-vis closer economic integration with China since the turn of the new millennium.
Article
The Past, Present, and Future of China–Latin America Relations
Carol Wise
Article
Peacekeeping Economies
Kathleen M. Jennings
“Peacekeeping economy” designates the political economy of a peacekeeping operation. It broadly encompasses economic activity that either would not occur, or would occur at a much lower scale and pay rate, without the international peacekeeping (or peacebuilding) presence. Peacekeeping economies are, to a significant degree, inextricable from peacekeeping missions: While they are not under the purview or direct control of the mission, the formal and informal economic activity that they include is important to peacekeeping missions’ ability to function in the host society. Of course, behind this simple formulation is a significantly more complex phenomenon. Moreover, the peacekeeping economy is not just an interesting empirical reality. It is also a useful analytical framework for examining and better understanding how peacekeeping is designed, regulated, and done; its socioeconomic, gendered, and racialized dimensions; and its (intended and unintended) consequences.
Article
The Political Economy of Intellectual Property
Debora Halbert and Ashley Lukens
Intellectual property rights (IPRs) encompass several different legal regimes—such as patents, copyrights, trademarks, and “sui generis” protections—developed to protect intangible assets associated with ideas, expressions, and inventions, which are included under the broad umbrella term of “intellectual property” (IP). However, the evolution of these legal regimes has always been fraught with tension. Those desiring access to knowledge without restrictive property barriers resisted the expansion of IPRs, which means that the history of IP is entangled in development efforts. As member countries of the United Nations sought to fully extend IP protection around the globe, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was created, central to which was the debate over the scope of international IP and demands by the less developed countries for less restrictive IPRs. However, it is the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Agreement (TRIPS) that has become the most powerful arbiter of IP rights. Meanwhile, the main debates and the specific political battles surrounding IPRs include, but are not limited to, biotechnology, biopiracy, copyright piracy, file sharing, traditional knowledge, access to knowledge, and access to medicine. Ultimately, the literature on international IP has evolved considerably, becoming increasingly relevant to more than legal scholars and business professionals. Nevertheless, additional research is needed in theorizing about the core concepts of IP; the complex role between nationalism, the state, culture, and IPRs; and the search for alternatives to IP.
Article
The Political Economy of Violent Conflict Within States
Achim Wennmann
The political economy of violent conflict is a body of literature that investigates how economic issues and interests shape the dynamics associated to violent conflict after the Cold War. The literature covers an area of research focusing on civil wars—the predominant type of conflict in the 1990s and early 2000s—and an area of research focusing on other types of violent conflict within states, such as permanent emergencies, criminal violence, and political violence associated to turbulent transitions. The first area involves four themes that have come to characterize discussions on the political economy of civil wars, including research on the role of greed and grievance in conflict onset, on economic interests in civil wars, on the nature of conflict economies, and on conflict financing. The second area responds to the evolution of violent conflict beyond the categories of “interstate” or “civil” war and shows how political economy research adapted to new types of violent conflict within states as it moved beyond the “post-Cold War” era. Overall, the literature on the political economy of violence conflict emphasizes the role of informal systems behind power, profits and violence, and the economic interests and functions of violence underlying to violent conflict. It has also become a conceptual laboratory for scholars who after years of field research tried to make sense of the realities of authoritarian, violent or war-affected countries. By extending the boundaries of the literature beyond the study of civil wars after the Cold War, political economy research can serve as an important analytical lens to better understand the constantly evolving nature of violent conflict and to inform sober judgment on the possible policy responses to them.
Article
The Politics of Regional Integration in Africa
Paul-Henri Bischoff
On the African continent, a commitment to Pan-African unity and multilateral organization exists next to a postcolonial society whose 54 Westphalian states interpret the commitment to unity and integration to different degrees. The tension between a long-term Pan-African vision for a unified continent that prospers and is economically self-empowered, and the national concerns of governing state-centered elites with immediate domestic security and political and economic interests, lies at the heart of the politics surrounding African integration and affects both the continent and its regions. The politics of integration demand that a patchwork of regionalisms be consolidated; states give up on multiple memberships; and designated regional economic communities (RECs) take the lead on integration or subordinate themselves to the strategy and complement the institutions of the African Union (AU). In the interest of widening the social base of regional organization, politics needs to recognize and give status to informal regional actors engaged in bottom-up regionalism. Of issue in the politics of integration and regionalism are themes of norm adaptation, norm implementation, intergovernmentalism and supra-nationality, democracy, and authoritarianism.
Article
Post-Hegemonic Regionalism
Pía Riggirozzi and Diana Tussie
The concept of post-hegemonic regionalism describes the scenario that has characterized Latin American regionalism in the last two decades. It first builds from Amitav Acharya’s work, in which he envisaged the end of United States hegemony and a world order of multiple leadership and power competitions, a scenario that he calls a “multiplex world.” To a large extent, post-hegemonic regionalism grew at odds with U.S. regional and hemispheric ambitions of market-led governance and in a context of weakened U.S. hegemony in Latin America. As a concept, denotes the region as a political space in which transborder governance is anchored in a new consensus about what cooperation and diplomacy is and is for, giving way to a reorganization of the regional scenario and the emergence of diverse efforts in new areas of cooperation. With this in mind, post-hegemonic regionalism is both a theory-based concept, contributing to a debate and a research agenda that branched out in the study of southern regionalism, as much as a manifestation of governance that re-signified and valued the regional space as one of action and contestation.
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Poststructural Research in International Political Economy: Problematizing and Politicizing Agency, Structure, and Objectivity
Joscha Wullweber
Poststructural research in International Political Economy (IPE) is a relatively young and growing field of studies that includes a variety of very diverse theories and approaches. These approaches to IPE emphasize the contingency of structures and meanings, and the struggles within the processes in which structures and objectivities are constructed. Poststructuralists argue that the subject is an inherent part of the structure. However, the fact that the structure itself is dislocated means that it is unable to completely determine the subject. From a poststructuralist perspective, it is not the absent structural identity, but the failed structural identity that renders the subject possible. Far from being relativist, the concept of contingency points to a structured uncertainty, that is, chance backed by force. Poststructural approaches aim at deconstructing ahistorical truth claims by exploring the processes of meaning-making and the various struggles for objectivity. Accordingly, they characterize the relation between state, economy, and society as a product of sedimentations arising from a series of social and political struggles. Relying on postpositivist methodology, poststructural approaches proceed on the assumption that meaning, truth, and facts are socially and politically constructed. For this reason, poststructural research has a special interest in studying the conflictual processes in which some meanings and truth claims prevail while others are rejected.
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Regionalism and the Global Political Economy
Axel Hülsemeyer
The terms “region,” “regionalism,” and “regional integration” are often used synonymously in the academe. For instance, one author refers to Pacific Asian regionalization, North American regionalism and regional integration in Europe. Some authors view “regionalism” as the analytically broader term. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a more general movement toward “economic regionalism or regional trade agreements,” building on the concept of “new regionalism” and coinciding with the notion of “preferential trading arrangements.” This implies only those integration schemes which have an economic purpose, are in geographical proximity to each other, and consist of more than two states qualify for inclusion. There are five stages in the deepening of formal regional integration: free trade area, customs union, common market, economic union, and political union. From the late-1950s to the late 1990s, two approaches have attempted to explain the process (rather than the origins) of regionalism: neofunctionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism. Scholars argue whether there is a causal connection between regional integration and Global Political Economy (GPE), or whether they are simply correlated. Three themes from the literature on regionalism and GPE can be identified. First, the numerous studies since the late 1990s that have taken a decidedly comparative approach, irrespective of their level of analysis, agree that there is some “logic” to regional arrangements. Second, confusion occurs with domestic causality. Third, large membership has become a concern for the European Union.
Article
Reimagining Africa: A Continent in Transition and Its Implications for World Order
Clement Adibe
Africa has made significant progress at home and on the world stage that belies its image as the backwater of the global system. Far from being marginalized, African states have exercised their agency in the international system through an extensive mechanism of institutionalized diplomacy—anchored on the African Union (AU)—that they have forged over several decades of collective action. Changes are taking place in 21st-century Africa as a result of these collective efforts. Socioeconomic data from the African Development Bank, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the United Nations, and the World Bank, indicate the economic, political, and demographic forces that are remaking Africa. Finally, the changes in Africa have implications for the evolving world order. Objective conditions warrant a reimagining of Africa as an agent in the international system, rather than as a passive victim of a predatory, anarchical order. Current challenges facing the post-war liberal international order make such reimagination imperative.
Article
Researching Modern Economic Sanctions
Menevis Cilizoglu and Bryan R. Early
Economic sanctions are an integral part of states’ foreign policy repertoire. Increasingly, major powers and international organizations rely on sanctions to address an incredibly diverse array of issues—from fighting corruption to the prevention of nuclear weapons. How policy makers employ economic sanctions evolved over time, especially over the past two decades. The recognition of the adverse humanitarian impact of economic sanctions in the late 1990s and the “War on Terrorism” following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks have led to major changes in the design and enforcement patterns of economic sanctions. Academics’ understanding of how these coercive tools work, when they are utilized, what consequences they create, and when they succeed are still heavily shaped by research findings based on observations from the latter half of the 20th century. Insights based on past sanctions episodes may not fully apply to how sanctions policies are being currently used.
In the latter half of the 20th century, the majority of sanctions cases were initiated by the United States, targeted governments, and involved restrictions on international trade. In the last two decades, however, additional actors, such as the European Union, the United Nations, and China, have emerged as major senders. Modern sanctions now most commonly involve targeted and financial sanctions and are imposed against individuals, organizations, and firms. The changing nature of the senders, targets, stakeholders, and economic tools associated with sanctions policies have important implications for their enforcement, effectiveness, and consequences. The legal-regulatory and bureaucratic infrastructure needed to implement and enforce modern economic sanctions has also become far more robust. This evolution of modern sanctions has provided the scholarly community with plenty of opportunities to explore new questions about economic coercion and revisit old ones. The research agenda on economic sanctions must evolve to remain relevant in understanding why and how modern sanctions are used and what their consequences are.
Article
The Sources of International Disorder
Aaron McKeil
Debates on the decline and future of the “liberal” international order have produced increasing interest in the concept and sources of disorder in world politics. While the sources of disorder in world politics remain debated and pluralistic, the concept is increasingly used with more analytical clarity and theoretical interest. This growing research on the intended and unintended sources of disorder in world politics contributes to advancing thinking about the problem and future of international order in world politics.
Article
Sovereign Debt Default
Giselle Datz
Sovereign borrowing and debt default have long been a part of a nation’s existence. Sovereign debt defaults (that is, the suspension of interest or principal payment on due debt) were common from the sixteenth century, when Edward III declared a default after military defeat in 1340, to the nineteenth century, when Latin American countries defaulted on some of their debts. Early loans were made in the form of repayable taxes until the system evolved to allow for sovereign loans, transparent enough that secondary markets for these debts were soon developed. A government may default on its debt due to unwillingness or inability to pay. In both cases, default is a difficult political decision whose real costs remain somewhat ambiguous from a theoretical standpoint. The costs of default are often contingent on the type of debt restructuring deal reached between the debtor and the creditor. The scholarly literature on sovereign debt crises is substantial, particularly with respect to the economic, legal, and political costs of default. More recent theoretical work has focused on the trend toward increased domestic debt, which is expected to help reduce the probability of a debt crisis. However, domestically issued sovereign debt can lead to other types of risk. While relying on domestic institutional investors in local economies can help smooth cycles of liquidity shortages, over-reliance on those investors (particularly pension funds) can undermine the solvency of domestic banks and social security arrangements.
Article
Teaching About the Global Political Economy
Kimberly A. Weir and Vicki L. Golich
Pedagogy is the discipline that deals with the theory and practice of teaching. Pedagogy informs teaching strategies, teacher actions, and teacher judgments and decisions by taking into consideration theories of learning, understandings of students and their needs, and the backgrounds and interests of individual students. The teaching of global political economy (GPE) offers an alternative, and a challenge, to conventional economics education. Its emphasis on the competing currents of economic thought and their association with rival political philosophies adds complexity to the subject. However, this engagement with controversial issues creates more intellectual excitement than a narrow, “technical” treatment of orthodox analysis. There is also more scope for students to link their own personal experiences with the broader concerns of political economy. By emphasizing a liberal educational philosophy, educators can attain a more grounded approach to study, relating to students’ own experiences and more explicitly acknowledging the role of personal and political values. Scholars argue that there are viable alternatives to the standard micro-macro-quantitative curriculum and to the conventional teaching of economics. A pedagogy emphasizing controversies, linking competing economic analyses and different political perspectives, is possible. Ultimately, the teaching of global political economy has some inherent advantages as a means of interesting and engaging students.
Article
The BRICS Grouping
Oliver Stuenkel
The emergence of the BRICS grouping has been one of the most noteworthy yet misunderstood elements of global politics over the past decades. Despite its role in the transition toward a less Western-centric world order and the group’s surprising process of institutionalization, symbolized by the creation of a joint development bank, the relevance of BRICS remains contested by many scholars. To some, it amounts to little more than a marketing ploy articulated by a bank to attract investors, with very limited theoretical or real-world relevance due to the many differences between member states. To others, the grouping is symbolic of a broader power shift that has taken place in the world since 2000, with profound consequences for international politics. At the same time, the relatively limited time and energy academics have dedicated to the subject in the discipline’s leading journals is at least partly due to a Western-centric perspective that still dominates the discipline, which limits the attention scholars pay to initiatives led by non-Western powers. During the 2010s, however, a growing number of academics both in the West and in the Global South began to analyze the origins and impact of the BRICS and to write about the grouping focusing on issues such as South–South cooperation; questions of hierarchy, status, global governance, and the provision of global public goods; as well as sovereignty, democracy, financial statecraft, and global order. Despite continued doubts about how to think about the BRICS group, there is now a rich and highly diverse body of scholarship involving many different theoretical and geographic perspectives.
Article
The Coloniality of the Scientific Anthropocene
Vishwas Satgar
The discipline of International Relations is not at the cutting edge of dealing with planetary ecological problems such as the worsening climate crisis. The notion of the Anthropocene developed by earth scientists highlights the extent to which humans are a geological force shaping earth’s ecosystems. This official scientific discourse has gained traction in the United Nations climate negotiations process and is beginning to shape the knowledge project even in the academy. However, the discipline of International Relations has not engaged in any serious way with the Anthropocene discourse. Its claim that the Anthropos, the human as a species, and more generally 7.8 billion people on the planet are responsible causally for dangerous impacts such as climate change clashes with how the discipline of International Relations understands and seeks to explain global politics through its theoretical frameworks, relations, dynamics, and institutions. This claim warrants critical engagement from the International Relations discipline. However, mainstream International Relations epistemology reinforces coloniality in international relations such that an oppressive and relational hierarchy between the Global North and South is reproduced while being oblivious to how the ecological substratum of our lifeworld is being destroyed through replicating modes of living central to global modernity. Ecological relations are not part of mainstream International Relations thinking. Within mainstream International Relations, its hegemonic theories and frameworks are the problem. The conception of the international and international relations operating within the Anthropocene discourse also reproduces coloniality. Although the science it furnishes to understand the human–nature relationship is compelling and important, its human-centered explanation of how global power works is inadequate and reinforces the subordination of the Global South. To overcome these problems, a decolonized approach to the discipline of International Relations is crucial. At the same time, given the urgency of the climate crisis, countries in the Global South need to remake the world order and its future through decolonized International Relations. Several Southern decolonial thinkers are crucial for this task.
Article
The Crime–Terror Nexus
Katharine Petrich
The crime–terror nexus is the convergence of two types of disruptive nonstate group activities, crime and terrorism. The phrase can also be used to refer to cooperation between criminal and terrorist groups. When conceptualizing the crime–terror nexus, it’s helpful to categorize relationships in three ways. To achieve nexus status, groups either collaborate, combine, or convert. The most common presentation of nexus (or hybrid) groups is terrorist “conversion,” when a purely terrorist organization transitions into a more diversified model, rather than criminal groups moving toward political violence (though there are some notable exceptions) or two groups of different types “joining forces.”
Responses to the crime–terror nexus have been uneven. Organized crime and terrorism research have traditionally been siloed from each other, with academics, policymakers, and law enforcement specializing in one or the other—an artificial divide that has become particularly problematic given the modern interconnectedness of political and economic systems wrought by globalization. Traditional security thinking is biased against crime–terror convergence because it emphasizes the difference in motivation between criminal and terrorist groups. Adherents have argued that any such relationships would be transactional and short-lived because criminal groups are interested in remaining out of the public eye, while terrorist groups are explicitly interested in drawing attention to themselves.
However, this perspective misses both the potential benefits of diversified activities for violent nonstate groups, and the idea that groups can pursue a range of goals simultaneously across different levels of the organization. Notable exceptions to this institutional siloing include “deep web” and “dark networks” research, which have identified criminal–extremist relationships as relying on similar infrastructure and thus persisting over a longer time span. Both law enforcement and researchers should take their cue from this wholistic orientation. Siloing crime and terrorism from one another presents operational problems: while these groups and their activities may move easily between criminal and political violence, states often separate their law enforcement from their military and domestic security agencies, creating bureaucratic hurdles for effective disruption of hybrid groups.
A small cadre of researchers, however, have begun to rectify these artificial disciplinary boundaries. Recent literature on the crime–terror nexus can be broadly categorized into four major buckets: the causes and enabling conditions that allow for such interactions, the spectrum of possible relationships, the ways that groups change as they move into the other’s area of operation, and the policy implications for melded groups. Drawing on work across criminology, sociology, political economy, history, and organizational behavior, in addition to political science, we can more effectively map and understand the contours of the crime–terror nexus.
Criminally diversified terrorist groups are a distinct security threat because they are more adaptable, resilient, and entrenched than their traditionally resourced counterparts. Further, criminal activity may alter a group’s long-term political goals, making negotiated settlements and demobilization agreements more challenging. By including the crime–terror nexus in assessments, both academics and policymakers can make more accurate assessments of the contours of low-intensity and asymmetric warfare, leading to better policy outcomes, durable institution building, and increased protections for populations impacted by violent nonstate actors.
Article
The World System in the Information Age: Structure, Processes, and Technologies
Joachim K. Rennstich
The new information age has the potential not only to alter the historical path of world system development, as other socio-technological paradigmatic shifts have done, but also to transform it substantially. One school of thought argues for a complete upending of past patterns with nation states in their hierarchical alignment as the center core and periphery of power in this system. An alternative view instead argues that the regularized interaction that characterizes a world system may envisage a number of modes of production without altering its fundamental structure. The world system in this view is made up of a variety of complex intra-organizational and interorganizational networks intersecting with geographical networks structured particularly around linked clusters of socioeconomic activity. Information and carrier technologies based on new forms of information technologies and their connection to network technologies play a vital role in the long-term evolution of world system development characterized by both path-dependencies and major transformations that result from technological innovations. While digital information technologies significantly alter the processing and use of information as a central element of power and control within this network structure and therefore its network logic, they do not break the evolutionary process of world system development.
Article
Trade: Determinants of Policies
Marc L. Busch and Edward D. Mansfield
A survey of the literature on trade has revealed that it is becoming more difficult for elected officials resist protectionist pressures by citing constraints imposed by global pacts and supply free trade. There are two main reasons why. First, the literature on the design and politics of international institutions increasingly emphasizes how they build in slack that can undermine government claims of being constrained. Second, as states accede to an ever-growing list of overlapping international institutions, there is often a choice among, or uncertainty over, which institution’s obligations apply. Where this situation creates more policy space for government officials, it also will make it more difficult for them to credibly tie their hands and supply free trade in the face of interest group pressures for protection. Currently, the literature is somewhat at a turning point. Questions about the design and politics of international institutions, and the growing thickness of the market for them, are very much in vogue. These questions have profound implications for the supply of free trade. The credibility of elected officials’ hands-tying strategies is likely undermined where institutions anticipate the political reactions of their members, or where members can shop for different rules on trade to accommodate domestic preferences. The irony is that the proliferation of international institutions may lead scholars of trade policy to renew their focus on domestic interest groups.
Article
Trade in Services
Russell Alan Williams and Jeff Loder
Compared to trade in goods, there hasn’t been much attention given to international exchange in services and efforts to promote liberalization of those exchanges. Despite considerable efforts to promote global and regional services liberalization since the 1980s, much of the study of “trade in services” remains somewhat underdeveloped. Governments maintain foreign direct investment (FDI) restrictions on the ownership and operation of financial services and media companies, and most countries continue to insist on strict limitations on the rights of workers to trade their services across borders. While the revolution in communications and transportation technology in recent decades has intensified interest in services, services are still highly regulated and the removal of traditional trade barriers is inadequate to promote liberalization. The initiatives undertaken to promote the removal of service trade barriers include the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) General Agreement on Trade In Services (GATS); the European Union’s (EU) Services Directive; and the ASEAN Framework Agreement on Services (AFAS) signed by member states of the Association of South Eastern Asian Nation members (ASEAN) in 1995. These initiatives have generated a range of academic controversies and investigation, which has explored three themes: explaining the process by which the issue of liberalization came to the forefront of the global trade agenda, deploying a range of theoretical perspectives; assessing the impact and effectiveness of services liberalization agreements; and explaining why it has proven more difficult to promote liberalization in the services sector.
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Trade: Neoclassical Liberal Views on Impacts
Jeffrey W. Ladewig
International trade is a dynamic and powerful force that affects nearly every individual, business, and nation in the world. Its scope and scale have also made international trade an immense, intense, and perennial subject of interest and inquiry. Some of the foundational works on international trade can be traced back to Adam Smith and David Hume, whose theories sought to debunk the commonly held idea of international trade at the time: mercantilism, which viewed exports as beneficial because they generated an increase in foreign currency and a nation’s wealth, and imports as detrimental because they were thought to decrease a nation’s wealth. Today, the general idea of comparative advantage informs almost all neoclassical economists’ models of international trade. However, neoclassical economists tend to assume that the theoretical benefits of international trade are clear, and thus, often ignore or dismiss the negative impacts of international trade and the studies that challenge their theories. In fact, many countries have not seen the benefits predicted by neoclassical economic theories. This is particularly evident when comparing the effects of international trade across developed and developing countries. Furthermore, there is evidence that international trade has developed along patterns that are not predicted by the traditional theories of comparative advantage. Given these, the practice of trade and its international impact can be much murkier.
