Eclectic political economies of a world disordered: Silences, interstices, agencies

Abstract

Post–World War II thinking about security, prosperity, and development emphasized macro-level explanations, applied across widely varied temporal and spatial scales. 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 informal 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.” 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. Within most of these sections, there is a clear