Política Internacional

Review of International Political Economy 17:3 August 2010: 425–453

International political economy and the question of ethics
James Brassett1 and Christopher Holmes2
Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick, Warwick, UK 2 Centre for Citizenship, Globalization and Governance, Department of Politics and International Relations, University ofSouthampton, Southampton, UK
1

ABSTRACT
The article provides a critical analysis of how IPE might engage with the question of ethics. After reviewing existing calls to bring ethics and ethical considerations within the mainstream of the discipline several questions are made. Drawing from critical and post-structural thought, it is argued that existing accounts of ethics privilege a problematicseparation between ethics and power. Power is depicted as obligation – as power over – while ethics is depicted as an ameliorative other to power. We draw out several limits in this separation – including the reification of market subjectivities of contract, individualism, and a problematic global scale – arguing that ethics should be seen as a constitutive discourse like any other. Power is re-phrased asproductive, as the power to. We conclude by articulating a pragmatist research agenda that seeks to foster the kernel ‘possibility’ in discourses of ethics while retaining sensitivity to the potential constitutive ‘violence’ of ethics. Given this dilemma, we argue that ongoing practices of ‘resistance’ – in both practical and scholarly senses – should be a central problematic for engaging with the(political) question of ethics in IPE.

KEYWORDS
Ethics; IPE; power; pragmatism; resistance.

Nearly three decades after Albert Hirschman made this call for a ‘moral social science’ it can be argued that scholars in the new disciplinary home of international political economy (IPE) are beginning to engage with ethical questions. In their critique of positivism, neo-Gramscian’s have insistedupon ‘an ethical dimension to analysis, so that questions of justice, legitimacy, and moral credibility are integrated sociologically into the whole
Review of International Political Economy ISSN 0969-2290 print/ISSN 1466-4526 online C 2010 Taylor & Francis http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/09692290903507201

REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

and into many of its key concepts’(Gill, 1991: 57). For her part, Susan Strange (1991: 171) recognised the problem as a two-way affair, arguing that globalisation also requires moral philosophers to extend their own purview: ‘[t]he horizons of moral philosophy, as of the social sciences no longer end at the frontiers of the state.’ And Richard Higgott (2000: 133) has also noted the importance of working across theory and practicein the evolving politics of global governance, arguing that: [p]olitics, in the context of the emerging global conversation about governance, needs to be understood as not only the pursuit of effective and efficient government, but also as a normative, indeed explicitly ethical, approach to the advancement of a more just agenda of global economic management. However, and despite the goodintentions of these and other significant interventions, we argue that IPE theorists have not yet reflected upon the question of ethics, per se? What is it? What does it do? How, to put the point bluntly, is it ethical? In the race to discredit the ‘scientific’ assumptions of previous work and usher in a greater reflexivity to the relationship between theory and practice in IPE, morality and ethics have beenintroduced in a straightforward, if not to say, caricatured fashion. As above, ethics is taken as an ‘inherently good thing’ that can be applied to the global political economy, a panacea for the ills of hard headed materialism, or a positive increment to the (power) politics of global governance. The central contention of this paper is that ethics – like positivism and power politics – should be...