How Not to Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste
Matt Ferchen
Abstract
Abstract Academics and policymakers have today become keenly interested in the relationship between economics and international politics. Despite this, and especially given interest in the security implications of the way states use economic instruments to pursue foreign policy objectives, researchers have too often failed to engage with the scholarship and policy lessons of previous eras like the 1970s when the academic field of International Political Economy (IPE) experienced a renaissance. This chapter argues that contemporary studies of economic statecraft and geoeconomics would benefit from three analytical insights and debates that emerged from real-world changes and crises in the 1960s and 1970s: (1) the need to acknowledge and bridge gaps in the study of international economics and politics, (2) the continued, if changing, relevance of economic interdependence on international security and power relations, and (3) the importance of state-firm relations for understanding the nexus of international economics and state power.