RIPE, the American School and diversity in global IPE

Abstract

On the occasion of the Review of International Political Economy's 20th anniversary, this paper systematically assesses RIPE's claim to represent an alternative to the 'mainstream' study of international political economy (IPE) with several new sources of evidence. The first is the IPE component of a 20-country survey of international relations (IR) faculty, the second a database of books in the field. The third, and most important, is derived from coding 326 RIPE articles published 2000-10 to discover key cleavages and trends. These results are compared with those from prior studies of the 12 IR journals identified as the 'leading' journals by the Teaching, Research and International Politics (TRIP) project. The article concentrates on five key issues: paradigmatic orientation, epistemology, methodology, policy orientation, and demography. The results provide ground for scepticism that the 'American School' of IPE does or will define the mainstream. The findings further tend to confirm that RIPE has stayed relatively true to its founders' intentions in representing diversity in the global study of IPE.