Globalization and International Political Economy

This timely and engaging study provides a much-needed critical theory of global politics. Rupert and Solomon place the politics of globalization at the center of a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary processes. Global productive integration, new labor relations and patterns of inequalities, transnational migration, the war on terrorism, and ideological struggles are redefining the traditional field of international political economy. While the authors emphasize the novel, contradictory, and open-ended nature of global power relations and future possible worlds, they do not lose sight of the continued relevance of inter-state politics. The result is a refreshing look at globalization as a process of social change being contested and reconstructed by forces from above and from below. Brief yet satisfying, Globalization and International Political Economy is well suited for students and scholars as well as for a lay public concerned with understanding the contemporary world. -- William I. Robinson, University of California, Santa Barbara; author of Latin America and Global Capitalism
Accessible to a much wider audience than most such analyses of global political economy. While many approaches to the study of international political economy see the expansion of free trade and the global division of labor as necessary and inevitable corollaries of the free market, this work places globalization in the context of the wills of political actors. . . . Ultimately, it is about politics and the political basis for the global economy. Essential. * CHOICE *
This is an excellent historical materialist introduction to globalization, migration, the politics of terrorism, and contemporary antiglobalization movements. It will be useful for students no matter what their political persuasion. -- Craig N. Murphy, historian, UN Development Programme