Eclectic political economies of a world disordered: Silences, interstices, agencies
| Author | David R. Black,Larry A. Swatuk |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020231157127 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Introduction |
Introduction
International Journal
2022, Vol. 77(3) 389–395
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00207020231157127
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Eclectic political economies of
a world disordered: Silences,
interstices, agencies
Post–World War II thinking about security, prosperity, and development emphasized
macro-level explanations, applied across widely varied temporal and spatial scale s.
Western scholars of International Relations (IR) were preoccupied with questions of
strategic balance and world order, typically focusing on possibilities for war and peace
through one of two lenses, Realist or Idealist. Similarly, challenges of prosperity and
development were understood in competing “modernization”or “dependency”terms,
where “underdevelopment”was seen as the product of either “backward”states or an
exploitative world system. In almost every case, the unit of analysis was the sovereign
state operating in an anarchical inter-state (or international) system. Over time, many
came to perceive these dominant explanations of (dis)order not only as deficient
analytically but harmful in practice. Put differently, the actual course of world events
rarely, if ever, matched the outcomes expected by the theorists. During the several
decades of the Cold War, marked paradoxically by political and economic turmoil and
rigidity, many scholars came to abandon dominant approaches, preferring to pursue
more complex and multi-dimensional analyses of the sources of, and solutions for,
insecurity and underdevelopment. For example, beginning in the 1970s, a critical
current of development thought shifted emphasis to an array of both formal and in-
formal actors, linking local, regional, and transnational dynamics, and highlighting
diverse forms of agency, including a central role for civil society. Among scholars of IR,
the so-called first “great debate”highlighted above was overlaid by second, third, and
fourth “great debates,”none of which is close to being resolved and has led to an
increasingly “post-paradigmatic”turn. This proliferation of perspectives is most readily
reflected in the number and variety of sections comprising the International Studies
Association (ISA). Up to the 1970s, the ISA “was largely [comprised of] scholars of the
international system, mostly political scientist[s], almost all from the U.S. with a
sprinkling of Canadians, many of whom had academic ties to the U.S., and about a
dozen members from the Caribbean.”
1
Today there are thirty sections, including
Environmental Studies, Feminist Theory and Gender Studies, Global Development,
Global Health Studies, International Political Economy, Religion and International
Relations, and a section on Theory.
2
Within most of these sections, there is a clear
1. See https://www.isanet.org/ISA/About-ISA/History (accessed 6 October 2022).
2. See https://www.isanet.org/ISA/Sections for details (accessed 6 October 2022).
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