Darkness and Light in a Global Political Economy

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 inter-governmentalism 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.