Seminar in International Political Economy

Catalog description

The goal of the course is to expose you to the core literatures of the subfield and to help you develop a foundation to serve you throughout your future research in international political economy. As such, we will cover a large selection of readings. We will focus on the central research programs within the field as it has evolved over the last forty years. Specialized knowledge will require a deeper dive into any given subset of literature. In other words, this course provides a sound introduction but acquiring true expertise in the field will require significant reading beyond the materials we will cover. We will focus most heavily on the politics of trade, exchange rates and monetary systems, and the politics of capital investment. We will also spend some time discussing international development, which although a subfield of its own has some significant crossover with IPE. The selected readings strike a balance between the major historical theoretic debates and contemporary developments. We will also have weeks at the beginning and end of the semester to contemplate the history of IPE as a subfield and potential paths forward.