Bridging the postcolonial political-economy divide. Towards a Theoretical Framework.

Points of contact between the postcolonial studies’ field of research and international political economy (IPE) are rare. On the one hand, one can note a reluctance in postcolonial scholarship to open up for economic analysis. On the other hand, IPE literature has been somewhat resistant to take up the postcolonial critique. This paper offers an interdisciplinary approach by merging the two discrete disciplines on poststructuralist grounds, suggesting principles for a postcolonial-political economy approach and developing categories to analyze power in the global economy. I argue that such an account deepens our understanding of power relations within IPE and that a mutual learning process can lead to a fruitful analytical tool to scrutinize the co-constitutive character of postcolonial ideas, beliefs and imageries and economic relations.