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International Political Economy and the Persistent Scare Quotes around “Development”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2007

Gregory W. White
Gregory W. White
Affiliation:
Smith College, Northampton, MA, e-mail gwhite@email.smith.edu
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Where does one locate the subfield of international political economy (IPE) with its study of North-South relations and developing countries? Attempts to map the field usually work on at least two levels. In the first instance, an intra-political science conceptualization conventionally invokes the fields of international relations and comparative politics and then uses words like “intersection,” “inform,” and “complement.” Indeed, if comparative politics is traditionally viewed as the study of politics within countries (often with attention to a specific region of the globe) and international relations is preoccupied with the relationships between countries in the international arena, efforts to understand the politics of developing countries obliges IPE scholars to engage both fields. How can one understand the development experience of a country (or region) without situating it in a broader international context? Undeniably, a country's experience with its colonial legacy, the evolution of state institutions, economic growth, poverty, corruption, globalization, and natural resource exploitation can only be understood in the dynamic context of the international arena.Gregory White is Associate Professor of Government at Smith College, Northampton, MA (gwhite@email.smith.edu). He is the author of On the Outside of Europe Looking In: A Political Economy of Tunisia and Morocco (2001) and articles and book chapters on Moroccan politics and labor migration.

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Type
REVIEW ESSAY
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 2007, pp. 105 - 113
Copyright
© 2007 American Political Science Association

[International Political Economy] is a vast, wide open range where anyone interested in the behavior of men and women in society [can] roam just as freely as the deer and the antelope. There [are] no fences or boundary-posts to confine the historians to history, the economists to economics. Political scientists [have] no exclusive rights to write about politics, nor sociologists to write about social relations.”

Susan Strange1

Quoted in Balaam and Veseth 2005, 4.

Where does one locate the subfield of international political economy (IPE) with its study of North-South relations and developing countries? Attempts to map the field usually work on at least two levels. In the first instance, an intra-political science conceptualization conventionally invokes the fields of international relations and comparative politics and then uses words like “intersection,” “inform,” and “complement.” Indeed, if comparative politics is traditionally viewed as the study of politics within countries (often with attention to a specific region of the globe) and international relations is preoccupied with the relationships between countries in the international arena, efforts to understand the politics of developing countries obliges IPE scholars to engage both fields.2

Some prefer the moniker comparative political economy (CPE), as it highlights the essentially comparative endeavor at the heart of analysis. Nonetheless, for purposes of this essay, IPE is used to denote the subfield.

How can one understand the development experience of a country (or region) without situating it in a broader international context? Undeniably, a country's experience with its colonial legacy, the evolution of state institutions, economic growth, poverty, corruption, globalization, and natural resource exploitation can only be understood in the dynamic context of the international arena.

At a second level, efforts to situate IPE also exhibit an interdisciplinary deliberation. Most obviously, the subfield reflects the collaboration or mutual consideration of the respective insights of economists and political scientists with an emphasis, in the final analysis, on the interaction of political actors and markets.3

Gilpin 2001; Strange 1988.

But economics is not the only field that political scientists explore. IPE scholars often conduct acts of intellectual trespassing in history, anthropology, sociology, and the humanities. In the end, IPE scholars are keen on recruiting other disciplines in their efforts to understand and explain the politics of developing countries.

Nonetheless, arguing that two fields inform IPE, or that it transgresses disciplinary borders, still does not provide us with much insight into what IPE actually does look like. Moreover, given the heterogeneity of political science—not to mention the wide diversity of knowledge and expertise pertaining to different regions of the world—it would not be surprising if conceptions and interpretations of a vibrant subfield would be diverse.

One useful way of gauging how practitioners understand the subfield is to examine closely IPE syllabi at the graduate and undergraduate level. Syllabi are many things. For one, they are social compacts between professor and students. As Brick suggests, “They are brief, distilled documents that illuminate what professors think is essential knowledge in the field, and why that knowledge is important.”4

Brick 2004.

A syllabus also represents, quite literally, an agenda—a program that ipso facto reveals a political bias on the part of the professor. (Whether that political bias is open to or dismissive of other perspectives is discussed below.) A syllabus also has a considerable amount of dead air or spaces between the lines; listing a topic or an author does not always indicate how that material is covered during class time. As any professor can attest, courses can often take unforeseen directions depending on the caliber, interests, and idiosyncrasies of classroom participants—not to mention outside events (in the way classes were affected in the fall of 2001).

Finally, syllabi also display both realism and idealism. Realism, for example, that comes from knowing that while a syllabus may need deep revision, there simply is not enough time before the semester begins to rework it as fully as one would like. In that regard, syllabi are often works in progress. Pragmatism also comes into play with sober appraisals of students' ability to engage and absorb as much material as one would like. On the other hand, idealism can be evident with the incorporation of new materials into the syllabus as a catalyst for the professor—perhaps a book that one has wanted to read. Optimism is present, too, in the high expectations common at the beginning of a semester or year, a buoyancy that sometimes lasts only until the mid-terms and is often gone by finals and course evaluations. But optimism is there nonetheless, especially when the syllabus is crafted or revised quickly before the semester begins.

In order to get a sense of how professors endeavor to teach the subfield, I reviewed 30 syllabi for courses on the international political economy of development. The syllabi, listed at the end of this essay, were collected by research assistants at Perspectives on Politics from faculty at universities and liberal arts colleges. Most courses are at the undergraduate level; yet consulting a handful of graduate level syllabi proved edifying, too. Most courses were also in political science departments, with a few from sociology and economics. Finally, most courses have been offered this decade, with only a few from the late 1990s. The main selection bias with respect to the syllabi was to choose courses that focused more extensively on development and North-South relations, rather than North-North relations. As discussed below, some syllabi treat both realms in their attention to North-North issues such as financial and trade relations between advanced-industrialized countries and treatment of North-South issues such as development, debt, international financial institutions, and foreign assistance.

An examination of syllabi reveals a strikingly heterogeneous and provocative subfield. Although the central traditions within IPE—liberalism, mercantilism, Marxism and, increasingly, feminism and constructivism—have long pedigrees, observers conventionally note that the attention to North-South relations and development emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Reasons for this emergence include a scholarly and policy response to the decolonization of formal colonial holdings, the continued emergence of the Third World, President Richard Nixon's move to take the United States off the gold standard in 1971, and the OPEC oil embargo of 1973–74. Now, as IPE nears 40 years, perhaps it is no longer appropriate to call it an “emerging field” in the same way we might describe, say, environmental politics.5

Ibid.

Indeed, the wisdom that comes with middle-age has put IPE in a sophisticated position to contend with (and teach about) the post-Cold War and post-9/11 eras. The syllabi examined herein reveal an ongoing and mature preoccupation with the changing context of development and, in a few instances, security issues.

Above all, then, this essay makes two arguments. First, it is apparent that IPE syllabi are intent on exposing students to the essentially contested nature of development itself. Many syllabi abound with scare quotes around “development,” “Third World,” and “modernization.” Many even use “so-called” as an adjective—such as “so-called development” or “so-called Third World.” Nearly all offer exposure to competing normative perspectives on the concept. For some, putting a word like development in quotes may simply be a way of indicating to students that it is a contested concept. For others, it may be offered ironically or even sarcastically. On a related note, several begin with sober overviews of l'état de choses, with factoids about the scope of world poverty or dismal characterizations of economic, political, and social circumstances. Many syllabi are, therefore, an invitation to students to examine, in the words of Moehler (Cornell), “why after 50 years of ‘development’ … so many people [are] still suffering from poverty, economic decline, ill health, political insecurity, repression, and powerlessness?”

Second, despite IPE's willingness to explore other disciplines, not surprisingly the fundamental bias remains a disciplinary orientation suitable for political science departments. Courses are clearly focused on the state, governments, political processes, policy choices, and political boundaries. Topics and issues treated include, inter alia, state formation, development strategies, the role of the state, and democratization. In one sense, this might seem like an obvious observation. Of course, a political science course would focus on politics. Yet Susan Strange's celebration of IPE's ability to engage transdisciplinary inquiry in the 1980s seems strikingly overstated. In the end, political science's blood may be thicker than the water of interdisciplinary inquiry.

Conceptual Issues

IPE syllabi consistently approach the subfield with a historical optic. Where they do not agree is on when history begins or, at least, what the assigned readings indicate to be the dawn of time.6

To repeat, a crucial caveat here is that a professor may lecture and lead discussion about issues not indicated on a syllabus. The focus here is on what is identified in the syllabus itself.

Here they seem to be divided into two camps. A minority locate the relevant history in the nineteenth century with the rise of free trade under Pax Britannica and the emergence of “late industrializers” such as Germany, Japan, Russia, and France. Given the focus on the role of the state, the history of nineteenth-century trade, and the legacy of European imperialism and colonialism, however, it is noteworthy (and even surprising) that only a few syllabi assign classic works on these issues.7

Gerschenkron 1962; Kindleberger 1975; Lenin 1939.

A second, more common perspective is for syllabi to start with the post-World War II era. Arguably, this is when development ideology began, with its full fruition into what is now called modernization theory in the late 1950s and early 1960s.8

Almond and Coleman 1960; Lerner 1958; Rostow 1960.

Syllabi in this second, post-WWII camp, typically jump right into the development-dependency debates and turn to liberalism, new institutionalism, and contemporary issues.

Despite the differing views on where to locate the genesis of the analytic context, the syllabi do seem to agree on the importance of offering students overviews of competing normative perspectives on IPE and development. Many syllabi (and textbooks) begin with overviews of different camps: liberal, nationalist, Marxist, feminist, modernization, dependency, institutionalist, etc. Perhaps it is here that professors provide students with the deeper history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not immediately evident in the syllabi. Assigning Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Alexander Hamilton, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Friedrich List goes far in providing opportunities to engage the twentieth century's historical backdrop. Regardless of how and in which ways history is examined, reading exemplars of various perspectives provide students with the crucial opportunity to learn an important lesson about empirical social science: one's normative perspective affects profoundly empirical analysis. Professor Khadiagala's (SAIS, the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins) syllabus is notable in that it is a semester-length treatment of development ideologies; several other syllabi also emphasized theoretical excursions.

Geographical issues also merit attention, as does the issue of debates about area studies. As is well known, the health and vibrancy of area studies came into question in the eighties and nineties as paradigms, funding programs, and international networks established during the Cold War became increasingly challenged.9

Guyer 1996; Haugerud 1997; West and Martin 1999.

Such challenges came from various directions. One was from scholars who questioned the value of learning indigenous languages, as well as living, working, and conducting research in the field. For example, political scientists such as Robert Bates issued sharp challenges to area studies, suggesting that they are deficient in regard to broader, theoretical concerns.10

Bates 1997; Bates, Johnson, and Lustick 1997.

A second challenge came in the form of controversial arguments that took on racial undertones with, for example, the argument that African studies, for example, was increasingly “ghettoized.”11

Curtain 1995; Spear 1995.

A third challenge was fiscal, as the end of the Cold War contributed to waning appeal for area studies for the federal government as well as private foundations. Longstanding sources of support such as Title VI funding, Fulbright programs, and the U.S. Information Agency were challenged by budget cuts. Programs such as the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the Mellon, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations, also moved away from area studies and towards other, broader concerns such as conflict resolution and the environment. To be sure, these challenges mirrored diplomatic and foreign policy developments in the post-Cold War world, as the U.S. government restructured its embassy deployments around the world and, as discussed below, conservative critics challenged the perceived liberal bias of academics.

What is striking about the IPE syllabi is that they remain committed to the insights offered by area studies; they do, indeed, “land the plane” into specific areas and case studies. Faculty seem to understand well that students learn best when theoretical issues are tied to specific examples and illustrations. In other words, the syllabi demonstrate clearly that the dichotomy between theoretical rigor and the purported parochialism of area studies is false.12

Tessler, Nachtwey, and Banda 1999.

In several obvious instances, such as the courses by Guo (Mississippi) and Murphy (Columbia) that are devoted specifically to East Asia, the vibrancy of an area studies approach is evident. Additionally, most syllabi that deploy case studies also endeavor to pursue cross-regional “comparisons” and “lessons.” Many courses have significant sections devoted to a given country or region. Some courses even offer assignments that prompt students to become country experts.

The bulk of geographic attention is devoted to Africa and Asia, but Latin America is certainly in the mix, too. Subregions such as East Asia, the Asian subcontinent, the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa appear to receive equal attention from faculty, but the consideration devoted to a given region seems to depend on the issue area. For example, sub-Sahara Africa receives consideration when the issue is debt or structural adjustment programs; the Middle East is invoked in the context of rentier states and democratization; and East Asia is the focus when export-promotion or currency crises comes into play. Again, this seems to be a benefit to students in IPE courses. After all, not only is the so-called “so-called Third World” a Cold War construct, but it is also crucial to understand that it needs to be disaggregated. Kapur (Harvard) offers an important disaggregation between lower income countries and the Big Emerging Markets (BEMs) of India, Brazil, China, Indonesia, and Russia. A few syllabi made spatial distinctions and connections between local and global interchanges. For example, Hamilton (Denver) and Paul (Williams) oriented significant portions of their syllabi to the linkages between rural development, agriculture, urbanization, rural-urban migration, industrialization, export processing zones, and so on.

As noted in the introduction, while one often argues that interdisciplinary approaches are essential, it is striking how many of the course syllabi assign writings by political scientists, with economists coming in a distant second. Sociologists and anthropologists were in evidence, too, but even further in the distance. Interesting dynamics were evident in the list of officially assigned texts, which is available at the end of this article. Assigned texts are a useful gauge of what practitioners view to be central in the field.13

At the same time, of course, they are an imperfect indicator, since readings are often assigned as articles in course packets, put on reserve, or are increasingly available online. They may also reflect successful marketing by publishers.

Political scientists Robert Bates and Samuel Huntington are joined by Nobel prize-winning economists Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz to receive the most mentions.

There is also a significant absence of novels and films, at least according to the class schedules presented in the syllabi. Novels included Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions; Paule Marshall's The Timeless People, The Chosen Place; Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah; and Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk.14

Memoirs were evident, such as George Packer's account of Peace Corps service in Togo in The Village of Waiting and Robert Klitgaard's experience as a World Bank economist in Tropical Gangsters.

And films were in even shorter supply: China in the Red, Father, Son and Holy War, Our Friends at the Bank, and Hunting Osama Ben Laden were the only films immediately evident. Again, faculty may integrate films and literature as pedagogical and heuristic tools in ways that are not reflected in course syllabi. Nonetheless, given the world of arts and literature that is available—and the insights that students can gain about the IPE from novels by Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul, Assia Djebar or a feature-length or documentary film like Maria Full of Grace, Life or Debt, PBS Frontline's The Crash—the lack of assignment is a surprising silence.

Political Biases

As is well known, the issue of the political bias of college and university faculty is a hot topic. For many in the media, for example, professors today are overwhelmingly liberal. The “liberal campus” is one of the great leftist strongholds and indoctrinates impressionable young students; political correctness goes unchallenged; and conservative professors and students are intimidated and harassed. According to the Washington Post, conservative commentators cite studies indicating that faculties are filled with an inordinate number of liberals.15

Kurtz 2005.

The axiomatic assumptions of conservative critics of academia are highly problematic. How, for example, does an English professor's vote for John Kerry affect the instruction of literature? How is it evident that a liberal history professor is going to evaluate her students unfairly? Importantly, the studies do not dwell on the political biases of faculties at law, business, and engineering schools that, one might hazard to guess, are more conservative. Worst of all, the condescending assumption is that undergraduate students are a naïve, uncritical sort, easily manipulated into holding views that they otherwise would not have.16

What is also striking about the “liberal campus” argument is that it marks a generational shift that suggests the degree to which the U.S. has moved to the right. During the Cold War, a professor was dangerous and un-American if he espoused communist or anarchist views. The fear was subversion or, at a minimum, unwittingly abetting America's enemies. Today, that professor is a danger if he voted for John Kerry, supports gun control and reproductive rights, and opposed the war in Iraq. Again, the implicit assumption is that his political views lead to bad things like proselytizing students, punishing conservative students with bad grades, discriminating against conservatives in hiring decisions, and skewing syllabi to reflect political agendas. These are, somehow, failings from which conservative faculty are immune. Above all, the professor is simply seen as incapable of teaching something with which he does not agree or identify—a treacherous assumption. What is confusing about conservative political correctness regarding liberal professors is that even if it were the case that liberals control academia, conservative power is so well entrenched elsewhere. Conservatives control the presidency, the courts, the U.S. Congress, state legislatures and state houses, law enforcement agencies, boardrooms, think tanks, and the corporate media, to mention just a few institutions. (As some have ruefully pointed out, liberals would surely trade several English and Political Science departments for the presidency and a couple of Supreme Court justices.) How refreshing would it be if conservatives expressed concern about the lack of diversity in the aforementioned institutions where, to invert the old aphorism about academia, the stakes are so big.

Because of my frustrations with the alarmism of conservative commentators, I watched carefully to see if IPE syllabi reveal political biases. Honestly, in the end, it is not clear that a generalization can be made. On the one hand, there are certainly syllabi that evidenced a critical interrogation of development, one suggested by 1) the aforementioned scare quotes and “so-called” when invoking modernization and development in what appears to be an ironic fashion, 2) initial paragraphs that offer factoids about the dismal circumstances confronting people in the Global South, and 3) significant weight given to the assignment of readings by left or radical authors. Interestingly, however, only a few of the syllabi offered engagement with post-modern and subaltern studies, especially those from the Indian subcontinent.17

Chatterjee 1986.

An explicitly critical take on development may be warranted, yes, but one would have to admit that it would be hard to imagine a syllabus for an undergraduate course on the presidency or Congress beginning with ironic scare quotes around crucial topics like representation or democracy, or reference to “so-called civil liberties.” Similarly difficult to imagine would be introductory paragraphs with grim factoids about campaign corruption or scandal. This is not to say that IPE professors are more to the left than their counterparts in the American Institutions subfield. That would be impossible to deduce from the evidence at hand. Nonetheless, one definitely detects in many IPE syllabi a left-of-center bias.

At the same time, there are also many syllabi that come at development from a mainstream, even conservative bias. In these syllabi one detects a thoroughgoing embrace of neo-liberal, market-based norms. There may be a brief consideration of leftist perspectives, but it is not systematic. In addition, rather than emphasizing external explanations of development problems—colonial legacy, asymmetrical trade relations, etc.—such syllabi focus on internal explanations such as corruption, poor institutional design and performance, and problematic governance. This is not to say that such an orientation neglects the international or external context, but weight seems to be devoted to the domestic context.

More difficult to assess in terms of political bias—but one that seems to tip to the right of center—is another group of syllabi that focus on democratic transitions, political liberalization, and electoral reforms. A small set that includes syllabi by Cheibub (Penn), Brumberg (Georgetown), Fukuyama (SAIS), and Schauer (Harvard), these courses examine the complex relationship between political regimes and economic development, with special attention to democratic transitions in Southern Europe, Latin America, and Africa, as well as the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

In the final analysis, IPE syllabi seem to display a rather vibrant political diversity. As noted earlier, students do seem to be well-served in their introduction to various normative perspectives. The challenge for faculty, of course, is to expose their students to a diverse array of perspectives within a course and to do so in a respectful fashion, even if, in the end, one perspective is preferred by the faculty member. After all, as John Stuart Mill instructed, it is in the “collision with error” that wisdom is generated.18

Mill 1993.

Methodological and Pedagogical Concerns

In terms of methodological approaches, there is a striking absence of quantitative and statistical analyses, both in terms of the assigned readings as well as with regard to student assignments. Of course, one should eschew a simplistic dichotomy that pits quantitative inquiry against a qualitative counterpart. After all, all inquiry (including the most rigorous of statistical analysis) is qualitative in that it involves interpretation, contextualization, variable selection, rhetorical presentation, and so on.19

Kritzer 1996.

A better dichotomy, therefore, is quantitative and non-quantitative.

That said, nearly all of the syllabi seemed to tip toward the non-quantitative side of the ledger. And, with the exception of Tomz (Stanford), faculty syllabi avoided an explicit treatment of methodological issues. Given the weight of economics in IPE and development studies, it is surprising that more attention is not paid to quantitative methods. It also may be a missed opportunity, especially for undergraduate political science department seeking to integrate statistical and formal modeling methods into a broader array of curricular offerings beyond the standard Introduction to Statistics class. IPE courses would be a logical place to start, and students would be well served, too. To her credit, Willis (Grinnell) requires students to provide a statistical profile of a specific less developed country (LDC). Similarly, in efforts to facilitate student's insight into a country or region's situation in the IPE, assignments might ask students to compute export extroversion (exports as a percentage of GDP), direction of trade, or composition of trade.

As noted above, most of the syllabi seemed to approach IPE from a case-study methodology. Case study methodology is a proven pedagogical approach, and is invaluable for grounding theoretical concerns.20

Boehrer 1994; Ragin and Becker 1992; Yin 1994.

If well done, the case study approach also provides opportunities for generating comparative insights, both within and across regions.

Only a few syllabi—e.g., Cason (Middlebury) and Boix (Chicago)—devote significant attention to North-North relations or the IPE of advanced-industrialized countries. Most are North-South in their approach. Admittedly, this may reflect the selection bias in the initial collection of syllabi devoted to the IPE of development and North-South relations. Nonetheless, IPE scholars and students working on North-South issues could do more to incorporate insights from Eastern European transitions, European integration, U.S.-EU trade debates, Japanese state-led developmentalism, etc.

Where it was possible to discern the nature of the assignment—beyond a vague “term paper” due on such-and-such date—an additional dichotomy appears to emerge, with some syllabi urging students to focus on a country or a region, while others devote attention to the analysis of institutions, process and/or policy. For example, Humphreys (Columbia) requires that students “become … class experts for one country.” Again, this is a valuable approach in that it grounds theoretical issues in a specific context; students often choose countries in which they have an abiding interest. Other syllabi, however, do not encourage students to become country experts, urging instead to examine a broader set of concerns such as the politics of development assistance or policies of international financial institutions (the World Bank or International Monetary Fund).

Finally, there is a curious focus on U.S. media sources in the common enjoinder to students to consume available news media. Papers mentioned routinely include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. At times, students are encouraged to read sources from Great Britain—namely, the BBC online and The Economist. Moreover, a few syllabi mention the Far Eastern Economic Review. These are reasonable recommendations as they are all high-quality news sources, and it is logical to list Anglophone news sources in a North American classroom. Nonetheless, with the availability of news media from around the world on the internet—much of it available in English—it is striking that students are not urged or even required to consume it to a greater extent.

Conclusion

Syllabi are remarkable documents. They reflect the accretion of years of experience and knowledge, a fact not well understood or appreciated by students and non-academics.21

Think of how family and friends never seem to understand the work that goes on during summers or between semesters.

They evidence not only an individual professor's expertise, but when assembled collectively the architecture of a subject or a subfield. As such, analyzing them is truly enriching and stimulating; I am keen to revise my own IPE syllabus with new ideas gained from analyzing the syllabi under discussion.

That said, I found myself asking what is missing from the syllabi? What is not well treated? When we look back upon syllabi from the early years of this decade, what will prompt us to exclaim, “Can you believe how little attention we paid to X or Y?” One noticeable absence, for example, is a relative lack of examination of religion and its relation to political economy and development issues; a notable exception is the graduate syllabus provided by Kohno (GRIPS).

A second lacuna—one more profound in my view—is the general lack of attention to environmental issues. Given environmental studies status as a new field and its obvious attention to development, it still receives short shrift in IPE syllabi.22

Brick 2004.

As one who teaches separate courses on IPE and Global Environmental Politics, I have to confess that I am guilty of the same transgression; it seems that the two courses only lightly inform each other. As for the syllabi at hand, it is striking how many syllabi scarcely (if at all) treat environmental issues. At best, environmental issues are relegated to the end of courses and textbooks, along with other “last chapter” topics like AIDS, immigration, human rights, etc. If environmental studies are the shape of international relations in the twenty-first century, as several authors persuasively argue, the trick will be to engage the IPE of development from a perspective sensitive to the challenges of crafting viable and effective environmental solutions, and offer such insights in courses for students.23

DeSombre 2002; Speth 2004.

Finally, a crucial silence seems to be a general lack of consideration of security issues. In the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, security is an obvious candidate for careful treatment by faculty and their students. Again, many of the syllabi under consideration are a few years old. But even before 2001, security played into IPE in a deep, complicated fashion if one takes into account the securitization of international labor migration evident since the late 1980s, the use of trade as a geopolitical calculation by the United States or the European Union, or the role of military spending and arms proliferation in the international economy.24

White forthcoming; White 2005.

To their credit, the third edition of Balaam and Veseth's Introduction to International Political Economy offers an explicit consideration of the intersections between security and IPE. Still, the lack of treatment represents a challenge to faculty seeking to educate students. For that matter, to return to the previous weakness, several scholars illustrate how environmental and security issues intersect in new and complex ways.25

Homer-Dixon 1991; Klare 2002.

In conclusion, IPE no longer has to proclaim that it needs to be taken seriously, as it did to a certain extent in its early years. No one seriously questions the value of examining the apparent development success of China, the Asian financial crisis, the impact of NAFTA on North American politics, and many other important events. Understanding the myriad development experiences of countries and regions around the world is undeniably essential. Judging from IPE course syllabi, it seems evident that students are directly engaging crucial theoretical questions such as justice, sovereignty, gender, governance, power, and so on. The subfield and faculty are serving students well, and there is no reason to suspect that it will not continue to be the case.

Syllabi

Undergraduate Level

Belanger, Marc. St. Mary's College. Spring 2004. Politics of the Third World.

Boix, Carles. University of Chicago. Winter 2004. Comparative Political Economy.

Brumberg, Daniel. Georgetown University. Fall 2004. Theories of Political Development.

Cason, Jeffrey, Middlebury College. Fall 2003. International Political Economy.

Charlton, Sue Ellen. Colorado State University. Spring 1999. The Political Economy of Change and Development.

Chaudhry, Kiren Aziz. University of California-Berkeley. Date unknown. Political Economies of Development.

Cheibub, José Antonio. University of Pennsylvania. Fall 1999. Democracy and Development (Washington Semester).

Davies, Matt. Wabash College. Spring 1997. Political and Economic Development.

Guo, Gang. University of Mississippi. Fall 2003. Political Economy of East Asia.

Hamilton, Sarah. Denver University. Winter 2005. Politics of Development.

Humphreys, Macartan. Columbia University. Fall 2004. Political Economy of Development.

Kapur, Devesh. Harvard University. Fall 2004. The Political Economy of Development.

Khadiagala, Gilbert M. SAIS-Johns Hopkins University. Spring 2005. Ideas in Development.

Menkhaus, Ken. Davidson College. Fall 2003. Politics of Development.

Moehler, Devra Coren. Cornell University. Spring 2005. Political Economy of Development.

Murphy, Ann Marie. Columbia University. Fall 2003. Colloquium on the Politics of Economic Development in East Asia.

Paul, Darel E. Williams College. Fall 2002. The Global Politics of Development and Underdevelopment.

Rosenblum, Marc. University of New Orleans. Fall 2001. Seminar in Developing Political Systems: The Politics of Development.

Schauer, Frederick. Harvard University JFK School of Government. Spring 2005. Legal and Political Institutions in Development.

Sobel, Andrew. Washington University in St. Louis. Spring 2002. Growth and Development.

Steinfeld, Edward. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Spring 2003. The Political Economy of Development.

Tomz, Michael. Stanford University. Spring 2005. The Politics of Economic Development.

White, Gregory. Smith College. Spring 2006. International Political Economy.

Willis, Eliza. Grinnell College. Spring 2002. Political Economy of Developing Countries.

Graduate Level

Eyoh, Dickson. University of Toronto. Fall and Spring 2004–2005. Political Economy of International Development.

Herb, Michael. Georgia State University. Spring 2003. Political Development.

Fukuyama, Frank. SAIS-Johns Hopkins University. Spring 2005. The Politics of Development.

Kohno, Takeshi. National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) (Japan). Autumn 2004. Politics and Development

Non-Political Science Syllabi

Mahoney, James. Brown University. Spring 2003. Comparative Development.

Miguel, Edward. University of California-Berkeley. Spring 2005. Economic Development III.

Assigned Books26

More than one citation is noted in parentheses.

Balaam, David and Michael Veseth. Introduction to IPE

Bates, Robert. Markets and States in Tropical Africa (4)

Bates, Robert. Prosperity and Violence (2)

Bhagwati, Jagdish. In Defense of Globalization

Boserup, Ester. Women's Role in Economic Development

Cohn, Theodore. Global Political Economy

Deyo, Frederic. Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel

Dreze, Jean,and Amartya Sen. Hunger and Public Action

Easterly, William. The Elusive Quest for Growth (2)

Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development

Evans, Peter. Dependent Development

Evans, Peter. Embedded Autonomy

Fukuyama, Francis. State-Building

Garran, Robert. Tigers Tamed

Handelman, Howard. The Challenge of Third World Development

Harrison, Paul. Inside the Third World

Herbst, Jeffrey. States and Power in Africa

Hettne, Bjorn. Development Theory and the Three Worlds

Hirschman, Albert. The Passions and the Interests

Huntington, Samuel. Political Order in Changing Societies (4)

Huntington, Samuel. The Third Wave

Jackson, Karl. Asian Contagion

Kanth, Rajani. Paradigms in Economic Development

Kim, Eun Mee. The Four Asian Tigers

Klitgaard, Robert. Controlling Corruption

Klitgaard, Robert. Tropical Gangsters

Landes, David. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

Levy, Brian, and Sahr Kpundeh. Building State Capacity in Africa

Martinuessen, John. State, Society and Market

Migdal, Joel, Atul Kohli, and Vivian Shue. State Power and Social Forces

Morely, James. Driven by Growth

Mowery, David. Paths of Innovation

North, Douglass. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance

North, Douglass. Structure and Change in Economic History

O'Donnell, Guillermo. Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism

Olson, Mancur. Power and Prosperity

Olson, Mancur. The Rise and Decline of Nations

Packer, George. The Village of Waiting

Pempel, T.J. Politics of the Asian Economic Crisis

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation (2)

Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence

Popkin, Samuel. The Rational Peasant

Rapley, John. Understanding Development (2)

Rist, Gilbert. The History of Development

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Said, Edward. Orientalism

Scott, James. Moral Economy of the Peasant (2)

Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom (3)

Sen, Amartya. Poverty and Famines

Skocpol, Theda. States and Social Revolutions

Stiglitz, Joseph. Globalization and Its Discontents (5)

Wright, Robert. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

Edited volumes

Allen, Tim and Alan Thomas, eds., Poverty and Development

Corbridge, Stuart, ed., Development Studies

Crane, George and Abla Amawi, eds., The Theoretical Evolution of International Political Economy

Frieden, Jeffrey, Manuel Pastor and Michael Tomz, eds., Modern Political Economy and Latin America

Frieden, Jeffry and David Lake, eds., International Political Economy

Goddard, C. Roe, Patrick Cronin, and Kishore Dash, eds. International Political Economy

MacIntyre, Andrew, ed., Business and Government in Industrializing Asia

O'Donnell, Guillermo and Philippe Schmitter, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule [2]

Seligson, Mitchell and J.T. Passé-Smith. eds., Development and Underdevelopment.

Official Publications

UNDP. Human Development Report 2003

United Nations. World Social Situation in the 1990s

World Bank. World Bank Atlas 2004

World Bank. World Development Report 2002

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