WHAT IS INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY?
The globalization of finance, trade and investment for the past four decades has fundamentally changed the way we live: from the way corporations conduct business, to the way nation-states construct and implement their social and economic development strategies, and the way engineers design and operate. New organizational structures are emerging: from region-markets and region-states in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, and Sub-Saharan Africa to the World Trade Organization, the redefined World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and even the United Nations, new global systems of interlinkages and interdependencies are being forged and are flourishing. Existing paradigms in political science, economics, sociology, and even history alone and in isolation from one another fail to explain the contemporary world and its complex realities fully.
International Political Economy (IPE) provides new, integrated, and flexible ways of conceptualizing, analyzing, interpreting, and generalizing the contemporary world. IPE is an applied social science that builds on the theoretical, empirical, and analytical approaches and methods of history, political science, economics and business, sociology, anthropology, geography, and comparative literature. At Colorado School of Mines (Mines), the faculty combines both IPE and comparative political economy (CPE) to provide methodological flexibility and at the same time, breadth, depth, and diversity in our curriculum and research agenda.
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