Disruptions to the rule-based liberal international order expose a disconnect between the complexity of geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics and the explanatory power of existing theories of International Relations (IR). Addressing this gap requires a problem-driven research programme that integrates analytical frameworks and methodological approaches across IR subfields. This workshop builds on efforts to bridge International Political Economy (IPE) and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), including a roundtable at the ISA 2024 Annual Convention and a forum in Cooperation and Conflict (Fouquet, Baydag et al. 2026). It aims to advance this programme through a special issue in a leading IR journal.
IPE and FPA share overlapping research interests at the intersection of the domestic and the international. Both unpack the black box of the state, yet have developed largely in isolation. This produces two symmetrical blind spots. FPA’s core concern with decision-makers’ agency remains a blind spot in IPE: how individual preferences, beliefs, personality, and micro-level decision-making processes shape policy choices (Hudson, 2005; Kaarbo, 2015). Conversely, IPE’s concern with distributional politics remains largely invisible in FPA: how international economic conditions shape the domestic societal context within which governments make decisions, and how domestic distributional pressures, electoral incentives, and their institutional aggregation shape foreign economic policy (Milner, 2002; Frieden and Martin, 2003; Schirm, 2020).
A growing body of scholarship has drawn attention to these blind spots (Fouquet, 2024; Kaarbo & Thies, 2024; Baydag, 2025; Young, 2026) and explored ways of addressing them (Milner and Tingley, 2015; Thies & Wehner, 2019; Calvert & Kaarbo, 2025; Schirm, 2026). A dedicated forum has laid a foundation for dialogue between the two subfields (Fouquet, Baydag et al., 2026), clarifying conceptual differences and identifying avenues for future research. Yet important disconnects remain: although the forum has brought FPA tools into IPE questions, systematic two-way integration needs sustained engagement grounded in concrete policy challenges where cross-level explanation is most urgently needed.
The workshop, therefore, aims to facilitate structured, two-way exchanges to develop a problem-driven, “eclectic” research agenda (Sil and Katzenstein, 2010) and ground it in current global politics, where economic and security issues have become empirically inseparable.
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Fouquet S, Baydag RM, Brummer K, Schirm SA, Oktay S, Moro F, Moschella M, Thies C and Wehner L (2026) Dialogue instead of mutual neglect? International Political Economy meets Foreign Policy Analysis. Cooperation and Conflict (first view), 1-30. DOI: 10.1177/0010836726142447.
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Schirm SA (2020) Refining domestic politics theories of IPE: A societal approach to governmental preferences. Politics 40(4): 396–412.
Schirm SA (2026) The domestic politics of European responses to Trump’s demands in defence and trade. International Politics. DOI: 10.1057/s41311-026-00762-9.
Sil R, Katzenstein PJ (2010) Analytic eclecticism in the study of world politics: Reconfiguring problems and mechanisms across research traditions. Perspectives on Politics 8(2): 411–431.
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Young AR (2026) 2025: The year in which Trump transformed Transatlantic trade. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies. DOI: 10.1111/jcms.70150.
1: How individuals, distributional politics, and external pressures interact to produce foreign policy variation.
2: How IPE approaches generate analytical payoffs for FPA on elite decision-making and foreign policy change.
3: How FPA tools applied to international economic institutions can advance core IPE questions.
4: How geoeconomics reshape domestic political economy and actors translate them into foreign economic policy.
5: How and under what domestic conditions and external policy spaces populists contest international institutions.
1: Great power competition, geoeconomic crises
2: Trade policy, industrial policy, sanctions, supply chain
3: Leader preferences, leader-society nexus in foreign economic policy
4: Populist politicisation of the global economy
5: Public opinion and foreign economic policy
6: Societal foundations of the new international economic order
7: Legitimacy of Global Governance and International Organizations
8: Elite deliberation and decision-making processes in economic non-state actors
