Of margins, traditions, and engagements: A brief disciplinary history of IPE in Canada

TL;DR: The work of as discussed by the authors explores the relationship between international political economy (IPE) and international relations (IR) in Canada in terms of its context, its diverse intellectual traditions, and its subject matter.

Abstract: Canada is a giant country on the periphery of the world. It is famous for frozen winters, vast stretches of uninhabited land, and rugged terrain. It is also a magnet for immigration, and was built largely on the backs of northern European and Chinese laborers. It sits alongside the twentieth century’s pre-eminent military and economic superpower, but has itself only a miniscule military capability honed through participation in both world wars and a mostly honorable record of involvement in UN peacekeeping operations. Its economy is powered by commodities and driven almost entirely by developments in its wealthy southern neighbor, yet it has been able to develop leading-edge technologies with global aspirations, such as the ubiquitous Blackberry. Is international political economy (IPE) even possible in such a place? The answer must be a resounding yes. By virtue of its position next to the UnitedStates (US), its rich heritage of diverse intellectual traditions, and a strategic interest in the issues and themes that resonate at the heart of IPE, Canada has been a fertile place out of which a robust engagement with the discipline has developed. IPE in Canada engages with a large array of concerns that animate its study around the world, including issuebased subjects such as globalization, development, inequality, inter-governmental cooperation and multilateralism, as well as thematic subjects such as great power rivalry, class formation, governance and inter-paradigmatic debates. Yet, what perhaps sets IPE in Canada apart from elsewhere is the way in which its close proximity to the US and its deep engagement with theoretical approaches that are critical of dominant American paradigms works out in practice. Proximity to the US presents to Canadian IPE scholars the sharp edge of how to deal with power in all its manifestations, while theoretical diversity ensures that IPE in Canada is not monolithic in its intellectual composition. The result is a vibrant disciplinary formation that engages with IPE on a global scale. This chapter explores IPE in Canada in terms of its context, its diverse intellectualtraditions, and its subject matter. A short chapter cannot do justice to the entirety of a discipline as it is practiced across the country’s forty or so major universities.2 Instead, it will use the career and work of one scholar-Robert W. Cox-to highlight how IPEhas evolved in Canada and engaged with the world. Cox, a Canadian by birth and academic training, returned to Canada in 1977 after spending nearly a quarter of a century as an international civil servant in Geneva with the International Labor Organization, and several years as Professor of International Organization at Columbia University in New York. The impact of his work within the disciplines of IPE and international relations (IR) is ongoing and powerful, thereby providing a useful lens through which to read the development of IPE in Canada (Smith 1996). We can use his work to trace both how strongly influenced IPE in Canada has been by developments in the US, and yet how it has been able to escape the singular reading of the global political economy so prevalent within American academe. Canadian IPE is not synonymous with the work of Robert Cox, of course, but he has been the anchor around which much of the research done within Canadian universities is organized, and in part through which it has engaged with the world.