Misrecognised, misfit and misperceived: why not a Latin American school of IPE?

Abstract

Although IPE has become more reflexive over the last decade, Latin America’s IPE thought has not been seen as part of the disciplinary canon. In this article we investigate why and how mainstream IPE misrecognised, labelled as a misfit, and misperceived Latin American contributions to the discipline. We also examine and define the ontological and epistemological characteristics, and the evolving boundaries of IPE studied in Latin America. We argue that differently from the relative homogeneity that defines and has nurtured the ‘Transatlantic divide’, the diversity of expertise, backgrounds, and analytical approaches has founded and moulded the Latin American school of IPE. While treating Latin America’s intellectual endeavours as an applicable ontology within IPE, we contribute to reframing narrow disciplinary approaches to knowledge coming from non-Western regions of the world. The notion of a Latin American school of IPE dispels the idea that regional contributions to the discipline may have been significant but remain in the past. To advance these global conversations, we must explore other IPE foundational myths and disciplinary origins beyond the disciplinary mainstream.

Keywords:

• International Political Economy
• Transatlantic divide
• disciplinary history
• sociology of knowledge
• global IPE
• Latin America

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgments

The article owes a lot to discussions with colleagues at FLACSO Argentina. We thank specially to Melisa Deciancio, Cintia Quiliconi, Pablo Nemiña, Juliana Peixoto, Pia Riggirozzi, and Ernesto Vivares. We owe a very particular debt to Ralf Leiteritz for kickstarting the incremental process of field awareness in Bogotá, in 2017. The gentle prodding but hard questioning over the years pressed us to reflect on the journey and roots of Latin American IPE. We also thank Anthony Spanakos for his careful reading of our manuscript at several times. Last but not the least, we would like to thank the RIPE's editors and reviewers for their thoughtful comments that made our manuscript stronger.

Notes

1 Even though recent works have paid attention to a newly labelled ‘Chinese school’ (e.g., Chin et al., 2013; Helleiner & Wang, 2018).

2 For a complete discussion, see the special issue published by the Third World Quarterly (volume 42, issue 9, 2021). See also Ghosn (forthcoming).

3 As an example of this long-standing mutual neglect, see Underhill’s (2000) survey of IPE after Strange’s manifesto. While development is hived off as a field, IPE is about what the great powers do. Exceptions are the works of Nicola Phillips, Antony Payne, Eric Helleiner, and Tim Shaw. See also Acharya et al. (2022).

4 Although Dependency Theory achieved some space in Development Studies, it largely disappeared from IR and Political Science studies in the years thereafter (Caporaso, 1980; Cardoso, 1977; Kufakurinani et al., 2017). See for a review Kvangraven (2021).

5 Both meaning ‘the practical’ and ‘the possible’, to stress that Latin American international thought (to IR and IPE) was always intrinsic to political options and real-life contingencies (Chagas-Bastos, 2022a).

6 Centre-periphery dynamics were indeed discussed before the systematic contributions of United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Those concerns were already present in debates among political leaders and intellectuals earlier on across the region (e.g. Bunge, Haya de la Torre, Bosch, among others). Due to the space limitations, we do not advance in this direction.

7 Rodolfo Stavenhagen’s Siete tesis equivocadas sobre América Latina (Seven Erroneous Theses about Latin America; 1972) later advanced Cardoso and Faletto’s propositions pinpointing that the same dependent dynamics were reproduced nationally.

8 The theoretical contributions on dependency marked a period of transition in Latin American thought in the late 1960s. The different strands within the Dependency Theory bring at the same time a critique of the classic version of imperialism and an analysis of the combination that is evidenced from the study of the social classes at the centre and the periphery, and their interrelations—in addition to understanding the phenomena of hierarchy and domination between states.

9 As noted above, transdisciplinary efforts have led to difficulties in outlining where the Latin American school of IPE starts and where it ends. Furthermore, the IPE umbrella served as a shelter to many who felt alien (to a greater or lesser extent) or wanted to flee from the cage of security and strategic studies—the so-called ‘securocracy’—in Latin American IR studies.

10 Foreign scholars also played a critical role during the first stages of academic professionalisation in the region—who faced specific challenges and research questions, applied their own theoretical and methodological approaches, and ended up modifying them for the local context.

11 It could also be that in Latin America a smaller group was involve in intellectual production and so they had to be more practical whereas in the US and the UK there were fewer public intellectuals and more scholars—and more space and incentive for non-policy oriented/theoretical work. These questions remain for future research.

12 The place of such distinguished ‘founding fathers’ of dependencia—very literally fathers rather than parents—requires no further justification and is explainable in terms of disciplinary dynamics of the older male generation repositioning itself.

13 We do not ignore re-evaluations of the dependentista’s legacy (e.g. Giraudo, 2020; Katz, 2018; see also 2018 special issue of Latin American Perspectives, “Freeing Latin America from Erroneous Theses”).

14 In these terms, agency is understood as the ability to active and effectively change and mould the world to someone else’s liking, to have a relevant effect on the surrounding environment. See for a review of the conceptions of agency in IR Hofferberth (2019).

15 We recognise the nuances and differences of approach between the ECLAC structuralism, the three dependency strands and the derived autonomy counterpart present in the entire building of Latin American developmental, sociological, IR, and IPE thinking. Due to the meagre space, and analytical organisation, we do not move in these directions. See for reviews on the differences among each of them Borón (2008) and Bresser-Pereira (2010).

16 With Cox’s heuristic concept of internationalisation of the state the tension between the national and the international levels of analysis is overcome by referring to international/transnational production.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diana Tussie

Diana Tussie is Professor of International Political Economy and Chair of the Department of International Relations at FLACSO Argentina. She was a visiting scholar at the Universidad de Chile, Universidad de la República (Uruguay), University of Manchester, University of Oxford, and the German Institute of International Studies. In 2017 she received the Association's Global South Caucus Distinguished Scholar Award.

Fabrício H. Chagas-Bastos

Fabrício H. Chagas-Bastos is an Assistant Professor and EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at University of Copenhagen’s Department of Political Science. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the University of São Paulo’s International Relations Research Centre. He held visiting positions at the Australian National University and University of Cambridge.