Towards Post-Pandemic International Political Economy

The COVID-19 pandemic and the multiple crises sparked by the global spread of the the SARS-CoV-2 virus should induce a reflection on the strengths of political science, as well as the limits of discipline. This paper calls for students and scholars of the interdiscipline of International Political Economy (IPE) to (re-) consider how their on-going efforts to bridge international politics and international economics might contribute to understanding the origins, rapid expansion and hopeful resolution of the global pandemic and its interlinked crises. This is an important task not only given the ‘urgency of the now’, but also given the manners in which the current crisis exposes longstanding blind spots in the interdiscipline’s prioritization of certain areas of international activity at the expense of others. Drawing out insights from IPE studies of crisis, science and technology this paper also highlights a number of pathways for enhancing interdisciplinary consideration of global health politics. In particular, it calls for a ‘post-pandemic IPE’ to engage and interact further with the interdiscipline Science and Technology Studies.