Of Gardens and Gates in (International) Political Economy: A Rejoinder
| Published date | 01 January 2015 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829814561037 |
| Author | Matthias Kranke |
| Subject Matter | Responses to Kranke Review Article |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2015, Vol. 43(2) 741 –742
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829814561037
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MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies
Of Gardens and Gates in
(International) Political
Economy: A Rejoinder
Matthias Kranke
University of Warwick, UK
Volumes as insightful as Critical International Political Economy: Dialogue, Debate
and Dissensus (edited by Stuart Shields, Ian Bruff and Huw Macartney) and Cultural
Political Economy (edited by Jacqueline Best and Matthew Paterson) are likely to be
read differently by different audiences. The editors’ astute responses to my review in this
journal (42, no. 3) thus allow us to better appreciate their original objectives and address
their shared concern: a too narrow reading of the volumes. Within the limited space of
this rejoinder, I engage with this particular concern to clarify that there is no one right
way to think about the gl obal political economy or global political economies in the
plural.
For each volume’s editors, the concern has a distinct origin. Shields, Bruff and
Macartney stress that critical IPE encompasses far more than neo-Gramscianism. Best
and Paterson, for their part, claim that the contributors to their volume are ‘gardening’
while my review is an exercise in ‘gatekeeping’. As Shields, Bruff and Macartney’s
volume powerfully reminds us, most of the time indeed someone is sitting at the gate to
regulate entry to the garden.
My admittedly provocative labelling of the two ‘C’ strands as different but often
overlappi ng group s in oppo sition t o ‘orthodox’ IPE was not aimed at proscribing the
continued use of a particular ‘parliament’, or at regulating the entry to any ‘garden’.
Most gardens are demarcated by a fence or hedge, but to stretch the metaphor, we can
choose to leave the gate open or closed. Also, paths or trails might connect some gardens
but not others.
The review sought to explore such connections between the two volumes – and
critical and cultural works on matters of political economy more generally – from an IPE
perspective. This attempt to add clarity to the relationship between contemporary
intellectual projects does not mean joining the gatekeepers. Nor does it amount to
Corresponding author:
Matthias Kranke, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: M.Kranke@warwick.ac.uk
561037MIL0010.1177/0305829814561037Millennium: Journal of International StudiesKranke
research-article2014
Responses to Kranke Review Article
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