Blind spots in IPE : marginalized perspectives and neglected trends in contemporary capitalism

Which blind spots shape scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE)? That question animates the contributions to a double special issue—one in the Review of International Political Economy, and a companion one in New Political Economy. The global financial crisis had seemed to vindicate broad-ranging IPE perspectives at the expense of narrow economics theories. Yet the tumultuous decade since then has confronted IPE scholars with rapidly-shifting global dynamics, many of which had remained underappreciated. We use the Blind Spots moniker in an attempt to push the topics covered here higher up the scholarly agenda—issues that range from institutionalized racism and misogyny to the rise of big tech, intensifying corporate power, expertise-dynamics in global governance, assetization, and climate change. Gendered and racial inequalities as blind spots have a particular charge. There has been a self-reinforcing correspondence between topics that have counted as important, people to whom they matter personally, and the latter’s ability to build careers on them. In that sense, our mission is not only to highlight collective blind spots that may dull IPE’s capacity to theorize the current moment. It is also a normative one—a form of disciplinary housekeeping to help correct both intellectual and professional entrenched biases

Seeing and not-seeing like a political economist : the historicity of contemporary political economy and its blind spots

Contemporary political economy is predicated on widely shared ideas and assumptions, some explicit but many implicit, about the past. Our aim in this Special Issue is to draw attention to, and to assess critically, these historical assumptions. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a political economy that is more attentive to the analytic assumptions on which it is premised, more aware of the potential oversights, biases, and omissions they contain, and more reflexive about the potential costs of these blind spots. This is an Introduction to one of two Special Issues that are being published simultaneously by New Political Economy and Review of International Political Economy reflecting on blind spots in international political economy. Together, these Special Issues seek to identify the key blind spots in the field and to make sense of how many scholars missed or misconstrued important dynamics that define contemporary capitalism and the other systems and sources of social inequality that characterise our present. This particular Special Issue pursues this goal by looking backwards, to the history of political economy and at the ways in which we have come to tell that history, in order to understand how we got to the present moment

Finance fragmented? Frankfurt and Paris as European financial centres after Brexit

Brexit creates an opportunity for alternative European financial centres. However, no comprehensive empirical analysis of the strategic positioning of actors within these financial centres has been conducted. In this article we outline findings from an extensive research project which we conducted in Frankfurt and Paris, two of the main ‘rivals’ to the City of London, in the aftermath of Brexit. We outline the core findings from this project and argue that the emerging competition between Frankfurt and Paris is shaped through four related axes: diversity, path dependency, territory and regulatory stability. Our analysis has implications for two bodies of literature within EU studies. First, inter-governmentalist and supra-nationalist approaches would benefit from interrogating more closely the contested sub-national politics of financial centres. Second, our analysis adds to a growing body of literature on European disintegration by interrogating the interaction of fragmentary and integrative dynamics in the sphere of European finance

Critical political economy, free movement and Brexit: Beyond the progressive’s dilemma

The progressive’s dilemma suggests that a trade-off exists between, on the one hand, labour and welfare rights underpinned by solidarity and shared identity and, on the other hand, open immigration regimes. With reference to debates on free movement in the UK, it is argued: (1) that a progressive European critical political economy literature of the Left has a tendency to accept this dilemma and resolve it in favour of a the former; (2) that it does so because it erroneously conflates the free movement of people with the (increasingly neoliberal) free movement of goods, capital and services; and (3) that it could and should treat human mobility as qualitatively different and, consequently, need not accept the terms of the progressive’s dilemma. The argument has important implications for a progressive politics in general and for the Left’s (particularly the Labour Party’s) position in the UK on free movement (and, by extension, on Brexit)

Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that many authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and Arrhenius (1896), and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.Comment: 115 pages, 32 figures, 13 tables (some typos corrected