Darkness and Light in a Global Political Economy

Abstract

If we make reasonable guesses about where blind spots might exist in IPE, we might be able to shine a little light in their direction. A disciplinary blind spot is suggested whenever our innate scholarly skepticism gives way to assertions of certainty. A conceptual blind spot seems indicated whenever we take the idea of political ‘structure’ to be more than a metaphor for the status quo and its impermanent routines. An empirical blind spot is to be suspected when the ideology of intergovernmentalism encourages us to exaggerate the limiting effect of organisational innovations in the mid-1940s, to avert our gaze from complex and ambiguous developments eight decades later, and to discount the probability of fundamental transformation in global governing practices over time.