IPE's vanishing Marxists, a thread.

@clift_ben et al. just published this cool study on citation networks in IPE in @RIPEJournal.

I've been thinking about this finding that Marxist work has largely slipped out of core IPE journals since 2010

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2020.1826341

The same pattern has popped up elsewhere.

@LenSeabrooke and Kevin Young found the same thing a couple years ago here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09692290.2016.1276949

(Parenthetically, I wonder a bit if that's less true of very recent RIPE and NPE. There has been quite a lot of very good Marxist and Marxist-adjacent work in both journals in the last couple years.)

There's a few explanations put out there in both pieces -- Clift et al. mention gatekeeping, Seabrooke and Young think it's mostly Marxist scholars self-segregating into e.g. Globalizations. (Which, for the record, is a great journal people *should* send things to!)

It's hard for me to square either of those explanations, though, with the sheer volume of really good Marxist work on IPE-adjacent topics in recent years. (Not gonna do a list, but look at e.g. the nominees for the IPEG book prize)

I think there are two other things going on.

If you take IPE in the sense of 'scholarly community roughly corresponding to the membership of e.g. @bisa_ipeg and the IPE section at ISA', the thing that sticks out to me is that a lot of Marxist work is being published, but it's happening either in books or in non-IPE journals

*A lot* of Marxist scholarship, by people with some claim to being IPE scholars, has migrated into development, geography and sociology journals, e.g. the Environment and Planning series, Antipode, Geoforum, Development & Change, Economy & Society, Journal of Cultural Economy...

(Would have also been TWQ until 2017 or so...)

So, I think some of the slippage out of RIPE and NPE is, ironically, much less Marxist scholars having niche conversations with themselves and much more Marxist work engaging with wider debates and different audiences.

Despite a lot of grand claims about being a 'master interdiscipline' and heir to the tradition of the classical political economists, in a lot of important ways IPE *is* a niche audience.

The other issue has to do with disciplinary policing less of distinct approaches and more of what counts as 'international'.

My own experience of desk rejects and dismissive reviews suggesting that my work is 'not IPE' -- one I think a lot of others doing similar work share -- has way more often had to do with focusing on local case studies in peripheral countries.

(To be fair, I have also had lots of entirely reasonable negative reviews and desk rejects...)

The 'international' is core to the self-definition of IPE, but often hasn't gotten a lot of direct thought in IPE work.

People often fall back on a reflexive understanding where anything that happens in Anglo-America, sometimes the EU, and in IOs (but mostly the IMF, G20 and WB, and mostly at HQ) is 'international' by default. Anything elsewhere needs to prove its international-ness.

A lot of recent Marxist work doesn't comfortably slot into this understanding of 'international'. (Though some does)

A lot of it has been engaged in debates around e.g. financialization, technology, climate governance, uneven development not happening in IPE journals anymore.

TL,DR: (1) I buy that there's gatekeeping, but I think it happens more on scalar and thematic than on theoretical grounds, and (2) if we look at where the Marxists have gone, it hasn't been into cozy niches, it's been, arguably, into debates wider than those happening in IPE.