States, markets and beyond: the nexuses between domestic, relational and systemic dimensions in IPE studies.

The third wave of globalization, since the mid-seventies, and, particularly, the global crisis of 2008, along with its warning signals through the Asian crisis ten years before, represent key watersheds in the global political economy. New intellectual stimuli have emerged, that led to re-think the role of the state in its relation to global crises, and to explore that of other non-state actors. Refecting on those developments, IR and IPE scholarships have suggested the existence of a gap in the understanding of how domestic, transnational and systemic forces operate in the genesis of major international political-economic outcomes. The acknowledgement of such gap has prompted some particularly harsh judgement on pre-crisis IPE research. On the other hand, it has also led innovative IPE research to widen the scope of the agent-structure debate, to theorize about the different modalities through which domestic and systemic determinants interact at the creation of relevant international outcomes. In this chapter I engage directly with that theme, tracing the origins and early developments of IPE as an academic inter-discipline, to argue about its theoretical potential on both the political-economic and domestic-systemic analytical dimensions. Looking at the redefinition of political spaces in the global age, the chapter then discusses implications for IPE scholarship, with respect to research on the role of non-state actors. Against the background of the millennium turn, the evolution of IPE as a discipline is then surveyed, and insights provided relative to the debates on the potential of the ‘new’ vs ‘old’ and current IPE (Keohane 2009). A case is made to support the importance of a pluralist stance regarding the conceptual possibilities offered by IPE studies on agent-structure issues, with particular reference to research on the global crisis and responses to it, as analysed by the different chapters in this book. Meeting recent calls for a more problem-oriented and pragmatic IPE (Johnson et al. 2013), the concluding section focuses on the non-prescriptive approach of the research conducted for this book and advances a few policy implications that can be drawn from its key findings.