Half Poulantzas, Half Kindleberger

Once upon a time, international political economy (as it is studied by American international relations professors) and international political economy (as it is studied by Marxists and marxisants) knew each other well. The realist Robert Gilpin, whose book on international political economy is still assigned in PhD seminars, disagreed with Marxism, but took it for granted that it was one of the major approaches in the field. Admittedly, studying the international economy through the lens of politics, as both Marxist and non-Marxist international political economists wanted to do, was seen by some as faintly subversive. Peter Gourevitch’s famous (among international relations scholars) article on how international forces shaped domestic economies was not notably ideological, but was nonetheless rejected as “Marxist claptrap” by one of the leading journals in the field.

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Other Writing:

Academic Article

Useful for What and Useful to Whom? IR and Its Public – with Jack Knight

Henry Farrell and Jack Knight (2021), “Useful for What and Useful to Whom? IR and Its Public,” International Studies Review, 23,4:1933-1958. The contributors to this forum all draw significantly from pragmatist philosophy and social theory for making sense of international politics. Collectively, we affirm the value of pragmatist work beyond metatheory and methodology, both politically ...
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Essay

Our Hackable Political Future The New York Times with Rick Perlstein

Imagine it is the spring of 2019. A bottom-feeding website, perhaps tied to Russia, “surfaces” video of a sex scene starring an 18-year-old Kirsten Gillibrand. It is soon debunked as a fake, the product of a user-friendly video application that employs generative adversarial network technology to convincingly swap out one face for another. It is ...
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