Babylon and on? Globalization and international political economy

Debates about globalization are now central to the enterprise of IPE. The substantive research agenda of globalization studies has yielded a number of strategies to qualify or refute commonplace claims about globalization found in much policy discourse. Yet the achievements of such scholarship have not induced discernible shifts in the deployment of ‘globalization’ as a key shaper of the realities of contemporary political economy. At an analytical level globalization studies in IPE suffer from a number of ambiguities that relate to definition, measurement and the nature of "globalization" as a variable in explanation. Orthodox (rationalist) reasoning might seek to either abandon or ‘normalize’ the concept of ‘globalization’. In contrast, this article calls for the ‘ideational’ matter of globalization to be taken more seriously and for studies of globalization discourse to occupy a more central position in the project of IPE.