Aspects of International Relations: International Political Economy

[Music] I mean I guess the way that people traditionally Define IP is that it's the interaction of markets and politics we sort of look at the influence of markets on politics but also the influence of course of policy on markets you know if you want to understand the world and you just look at economic forces or if you just look at political forces there's a lot that you miss economics tends to neglect the political factors that shape International economic relations international relations study tends to focus on relations between countries between states between power relationships and

it tends to neglect uh International economics and that's clearly uh problematic in a world that's becoming more globalized the core of Ip uh is um International money or international finance in other words what with the causes of the financial crisis in 2008 and the consequences of that uh another area would be international trade and investment what drives the globalization of markets what factors shape the flow of trade and investment um it's also areas like environment so International political economy of the environment what impedes conclusion of a genuine agreement on climate change uh these are not

straightforward economic or political factors but a mixture of both you know if you just look at politics a lot of the things that we know about political structures and their outcomes that they produced are all kind of based on power um and the traditional approaches would exclude looking at economics they just sort of look at you know military power sort of con conventional ways of measuring measuring who's sort of the strong actor and whether they get what they want um by contrast if you if you just look at economics um you know that's something that

explains a lot about how markets work but it doesn't really take into account power dynamics and it doesn't take into account political institutions um International institutions so IP sort of brings all of that stuff together I would say so substantively we enjoy some overlap with what a lot of our IR colleagues are are doing so um this is clearest in the relationship between um security uh on the one side and then political economy and we can see all kinds of instances of course where um political economy and foreign economic policy is used to try to

achieve uh security um goals for instance use of economic sanctions to try to um change another States security uh Behavior or sort of military um uh aggression those kinds of things we also see things in in in the other direction as well so uh the creation of alliances sometimes with Partners who might make for very good investment opportunity ities or um become good trading partners and of course that can be uh collaborative and Cooperative but it can also be dominating and and take the form of of imperialism if everything were economic forces we wouldn't be

in the like 12th iteration of the Greek you know of the Greek Eurozone crisis uh you know there are a lot of things that politics explains you the timing of or the sort of Persistence of in the general public debate about some of these issues there tends to be a simplification or a particular slant put by governments or by interest groups and what I think IP can do is to provide an analysis of that and an objective assessment of the broader cost benefits for the economy but also for society as a whole there are relatively

High opportunity costs uh to work in the field of Ip as an e academic because typically and a lot of my colleagues could earn more money and and perhaps have better working hours if they were to go into other fields and so most of us that remain I think are very passionate about trying to actually find a way to do things better year after year IP proves itself to be worth studying I mean I got my first job in 2008 which was sort of right when the financial crisis hit and you know I said to

my classroom at the time oh there's no better time to be studying ibe um and I say that every year because it it it turns out to be renewably true I mean there's always stuff in the headlines that um I think you understand a lot more if you do have an IP perspective sort of in your um you know in Your Arsenal the Masters in international political economy at the lsse was one of the first that was established in in the UK in fact one of the first programs internationally uh I think I think the

benefits it offers for participants is it gives a very broad understanding of how the international economy functions so not as I say not looking at it from a narrow or relatively narrow economic perspective or international relations perspective but it gives a broad overview it provides participants with the tools they would need in order to analyze any particular policy area and understand the factors the forces the ideas that are shaping developments in that particular policy area so it's a it's a program that's I think well appreciated by in the public and private sector outside uh of

the lsse so participants go on to work in government in private sector in international organizations after the end of the um cold war in the early 1990s and when people thought the Cold War was over you had uh Scholars like Francis fukiyama talking about the end of history and the sort of notion was that there there wouldn't be another set of great debates because it seemed that the liberal Democratic model had had won uh at about the same time you have Alan Greenspan talking about a great normalization that we sort of figured out how to

um run uh macroeconomic policy and then you have a series of repeated Financial crises and um debt crises and we've sort of been between one either in a crisis or just coming out of were just going into a crisis since the mid to late 1990s and I think there's a much broader view now in or much more broadly accepted view in IP that a lot of what we thought we knew just isn't the case a lot of our old tools and techniques just aren't working the way that we expected and so on the one hand

it can be very dismaying and uh challenging to us because we think my gosh we thought we knew what was going on and yet it seems like uh every everywhere we look the the old the old um uh maxims just aren't aren't playing out on the other hand as an academic it's extraordinarily exciting because uh there's a lot of room for us to do a lot of good and and to try to come up with a new way to synthesize all these these new uh anomalies that uh we've been uh [Music] experiencing