Gaps in Contemporary International Political Economy Research: An Analytical Review of Structural Challenges, Technological Transformations, and Institutional Reconfigurations

1. Introduction

There is something quietly ironic about the intellectual predicament in which International Political Economy (IPE) now finds itself. For roughly three decades following the Cold War's end, the discipline invested considerable energy in refining theories of cooperation, liberalization, and institutional design—theoretical projects premised, whether explicitly or implicitly, on the assumption that world politics was moving in a broadly liberal direction. Fukuyama's (1992) “end of history” was not a thesis that serious scholars endorsed without qualification, yet it supplied the horizon against which the field's questions were formulated and its answers evaluated. Trade liberalization, financial openness, and the institutionalization of interstate cooperation were treated not merely as objects of analysis but as the presumed trajectory of world politics itself (Cohen, 2019; Ikenberry, 2018).

That trajectory now appears both doubtful and, in important respects, retrospectively illusory. The past decade has confronted IPE with a convergence of developments that challenge not only specific theoretical claims but the foundational assumptions from which those claims derived. China has emerged not as a liberal power gradually integrating into the existing order but as a systemic rival deliberately constructing alternatives to it (Hopewell, 2021; Weiss & Wallace, 2021). Multilateral institutions have become sites of geopolitical contestation rather than platforms for consensual governance (Cooley & Nexon, 2020). Economic interdependence—once theorized as a structural pacifier—has been weaponized by states seeking coercive leverage over adversaries (Drezner et al., 2021; Farrell & Newman, 2019, 2023). Climate change has elevated resource politics from a peripheral concern to a structural determinant of interstate competition (Bridge & Faigen, 2022; Newell, 2021). Digital technologies have generated forms of power and vulnerability that existing IPE categories were never designed to capture (Haskel & Westlake, 2017; Zuboff, 2019). And war returned to Europe in February 2022, delivering the uncomfortable reminder that economics and security were never as neatly separable as the field had assumed (Tooze, 2021). These developments are no longer merely impressionistic: gravity-model estimates now document statistically significant declines in trade and investment flows between geopolitically distant blocs, providing quantitative confirmation that fragmentation has moved from rhetoric to measurable structure (Gopinath et al., 2025).

The intellectual challenge this convergence poses is not merely empirical. It is theoretical and ontological. The dominant traditions in IPE were organized around a vision of political economy reflecting specific historical conditions. As Ruggie's (1982) foundational analysis demonstrated, the postwar international economic order rested on a carefully constructed political bargain: the reconciliation of international openness with domestic social stability, sustained by American hegemony and underwritten by a shared commitment among Western states to managed capitalism. Strange (1988), approaching the same period from a different analytical angle, identified the structural dimensions of American power—in finance, production, security, and knowledge—as what made the liberal order genuinely systemic rather than merely institutional. These insights described a specific historical configuration, not universal theoretical truths from which policy and prediction could be indefinitely derived.

Against this backdrop, this paper advances a straightforward but consequential argument: IPE is experiencing a crisis of relevance, not because its analytical tools are inherently invalid but because the empirical phenomena those tools were designed to explain are undergoing rapid structural transformation (Cohen, 2019; Helleiner, 2021). The field must confront five foundational research gaps that represent not incremental extensions of existing programs but fundamental challenges to IPE's core categories of state, market, power, institution, and development. Addressing them requires new empirical research alongside a reconsideration of the ontological and epistemological commitments that have shaped the field over the past half-century.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 reviews theoretical literature and contextualizes the five gaps within the field's intellectual history. Section 3 outlines the research methodology. Section 4 presents the data analysis and findings for each gap. Section 5 discusses the interconnections among the gaps and their broader analytical implications. Section 6 concludes, and Section 7 offers recommendations for further research.

2. Literature Review

This section surveys the intellectual evolution of International Political Economy. Drawing on landmark works and the most recent peer-reviewed scholarship, it traces the construction and consolidation of liberal IPE, examines the cracks that appeared in established paradigms after the global financial crisis and the rise of non-liberal economic models, and identifies five urgent research gaps that now define the frontier of IPE inquiry.

2.1. The Construction and Consolidation of Liberal IPE

International Political Economy emerged as a distinct academic discipline in the early 1970s from the recognition that the traditional boundaries between economics and political science were intellectually untenable (Cohen, 2007; Gilpin, 1987). The collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries oil shocks, and the visible interpenetration of market forces and state power made clear that neither neoclassical economics nor conventional international relations theory could adequately explain global economic dynamics on its own. The discipline that emerged was institutionally hybrid, methodologically diverse, and theoretically contested, though its contestation took place within broadly liberal parameters.

The theoretical pillars that came to dominate mainstream American IPE were liberal institutionalism, hegemonic stability theory, and what Lake (2009) termed open economy politics. Keohane's (1984) After Hegemony constituted the foundational statement of liberal institutionalism's core argument: that states, despite operating in an anarchic international environment, could sustain cooperation through institution-building mechanisms that reduced transaction costs and enabled credible long-term commitments. Keohane and Nye (1977) had earlier demonstrated that complex interdependence, the multiplication of cross-border ties across state, societal, and transnational channels—transformed international politics in ways that classical realism's exclusive focus on military power could not accommodate. Gilpin (1987) provided a more skeptical account organized around the logic of hegemonic stability, arguing that open international economic orders require the leadership of a dominant state willing and able to provide the requisite collective goods.

What these frameworks shared, despite their differences, was a common liberal ontology. They treated the progressive institutionalization of international economic relations as both a descriptive tendency and a normative aspiration. Ruggie's (1982) concept of embedded liberalism, the postwar bargain reconciling international openness with domestic social protection—supplied the normative architecture within which these institutional projects made sense. Strange (1988) was among the most incisive internal critics of this consensus, arguing that power relations, both structural and relational, were systematically underweighted in liberal accounts of international order. Cox (1987) offered a more fundamental critique from a neo-Gramscian perspective, insisting that the liberal order was not a natural equilibrium but a historically specific hegemonic formation serving class interests. Despite these critical contributions, the field's dominant research programs through the 1990s and 2000s remained organized around liberal assumptions about the direction of global political economy (Blyth, 2009).

2.2. Cracks in the Liberal Framework

The 2008 global financial crisis marked a turning point, though its full theoretical implications for IPE took years to register. Helleiner's (2014) meticulous account of post-crisis financial governance documented a central paradox: despite the most severe financial disruption since 1929, the international regulatory response was reformist rather than transformative, preserving the basic architecture of financial globalization while adding macroprudential guardrails around it. Tooze (2018) situated the crisis within a broader account of how financial catastrophe reshaped political possibilities across the Atlantic, demonstrating that the connections among financial markets, state power, and democratic legitimacy were far more intimate and consequential than standard accounts of central bank independence and market self-regulation had acknowledged. These contributions revealed a field that had analytically separated finance and politics in ways that the crisis exposed as deeply misleading (Starrs, 2019).

The crisis of liberal order accelerated across the 2010s as phenomena that earlier frameworks had treated as marginal or temporary proved to be structural. Ikenberry (2018) acknowledged the depth of the challenge confronting the liberal international order while arguing for its normative resilience. Cooley and Nexon (2020) were more direct in their assessment: the American-led order was unraveling not merely because of domestic distributional failures but because states that had never fully accepted liberal norms were deliberately constructing alternative institutional frameworks. Slobodian's (2018) intellectual history of neoliberalism added an important analytical corrective, demonstrating that the liberal order had always been more about insulating market relations from democratic contestation than about extending democratic freedoms—a distinction that complicated both the standard narrative of liberal decline and the field's capacity to theorize the alternatives being constructed in its shadow.

China's developmental trajectory has proven the single most consequential development for IPE's theoretical adequacy. Naughton (2021) demonstrates that Chinese industrial policy from 1978 to 2020 constituted a genuinely distinctive developmental logic—one that strategically engaged with global markets while systematically building indigenous technological capabilities, maintaining state control over strategic sectors, and subordinating market rationality to political-economic objectives defined by the party-state. This was not a transitional developmental state converging toward liberal capitalism; it was a sophisticated alternative model of political economy demanding new theoretical tools (Hopewell, 2021; Weiss & Wallace, 2021). Musacchio et al. (2015) documented comparable dynamics across what they characterize as new varieties of state capitalism—in the Gulf states, Russia, and across emerging economies—identifying political-economic formations characterized by sophisticated management of the state–market boundary that neither the developmental state model nor the authoritarianism literature adequately captured. Babic et al. (2020) extend this line of inquiry by mapping the rise of transnational state capital, showing that state-owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds have become major players in global investment markets in ways that reorganize the state–market distinction itself.

2.3. Identifying the Five Research Gaps

The literature surveyed above converges on the recognition that IPE's existing frameworks, for all their analytical power, are inadequate to several urgent and interconnected research frontiers. First, the field lacks a systematic theory of non-liberal economic orders and their interactions with the residual liberal architecture (Babic et al., 2020; Cooley & Nexon, 2020; Naughton, 2021). Second, the political economy of climate change and the green transition remain underdeveloped relative to its structural significance (Meckling & Allan, 2020; Newell, 2021; Newell & Mulvaney, 2013). Third, the re-militarization of economics, the systematic weaponization of economic interdependence as a tool of statecraft—has outpaced the field's theoretical toolkit, with the weaponized interdependence framework offering a partial but incomplete analytical response (Drezner et al., 2021; Farrell & Newman, 2019, 2023). Fourth, the shift toward intangible capital and platform-based economic organization challenges virtually every established IPE category, from ownership and trade to regulation and development (Haskel & Westlake, 2017; Miller, 2022; Srnicek, 2017; Zuboff, 2019). Fifth, the political dimensions of finance—its distributional consequences, geopolitical entanglements, and implications for monetary sovereignty—remain inadequately integrated into mainstream IPE scholarship despite foundational contributions from Eichengreen (2011), Helleiner (2014), McDowell (2023), and Tooze (2018). As shown in Table 1, the disjuncture between traditional IPE assumptions and the realities these gaps expose provides an analytical baseline for the paper's substantive argument.

Table 2 extends this assessment by situating the five gaps within a systematic evaluation of IPE's major theoretical frameworks, identifying the specific analytical limitations each faces in the contemporary context. The comparison underscores a central theme of this review: the limitations are not idiosyncratic weaknesses of individual research programs but shared consequences of a common liberal inheritance.

2.4. The Contemporary Research Landscape: A Critical Synthesis

Post-2019 scholarship has increasingly recognized that the challenges confronting IPE are systemic rather than sectoral. Drezner et al. (2021) argue that weaponized interdependence has become a generalized condition of global political economy rather than an exceptional use of economic tools. Kalyanpur and Newman (2019) demonstrate how jurisdictional expansion—particularly by U.S. regulatory agencies—has become a structural feature of contemporary economic statecraft. Miller's (2022) analysis of the semiconductor industry reveals how a single technology domain has become the linchpin of both economic competitiveness and geopolitical rivalry. McDowell (2023) documents the accelerating international backlash against dollar hegemony as sanctions fatigue catalyzes sovereign diversification strategies. Hopewell (2021) traces how U.S.–China rivalry has reconfigured the governance of global trade, with the World Trade Organization increasingly paralyzed by contestation among its most powerful members.

The most recent wave of peer-reviewed scholarship, published between 2022 and 2026, has begun converting these qualitative diagnoses into systematic theory and measurement. Juhász et al. (2024) consolidate a new economics of industrial policy, moving the literature beyond whether states should intervene toward how, where, and with what distributional consequences interventions succeed. Bauerle Danzman and Meunier (2024) document the European Union's geoeconomic turn from policy laggard to institutional innovator in investment screening and anti-coercion instruments. Gopinath et al. (2025) provides the most rigorous quantitative evidence to date of geoeconomic fragmentation, estimating significant declines in trade and foreign direct investment between geopolitically distant blocs since 2022. Riofrancos (2023) theorizes the security–sustainability nexus through which Global North states justify the onshoring of critical mineral extraction, while Arslanalp et al. (2022) document the stealth erosion of dollar dominance as central banks diversify toward nontraditional reserve currencies. In the institutional domain, Daßler et al. (2026) show that China-led development banks simultaneously cooperate and compete with incumbent multilateral lenders—a finding that complicates binary narratives of parallel-order construction. Table 3 synthesizes this recent scholarship against the five gaps identified in this paper.

3. Methodology

This section outlines the research design guiding the study: a qualitative strategy centered on systematic synthetic literature review, complemented by comparative conceptual analysis, historical institutionalism, and structured conceptual mapping.

3.1. Research Design and Epistemological Foundations

This paper adopts a qualitative research design grounded in the interpretivist tradition of IPE scholarship. Its primary method is systematic synthetic literature review—the structured integration of findings across subfields and adjacent disciplines to identify emergent research frontiers and the theoretical gaps they expose. This approach reflects what Spilker (2025) identifies as the growing recognition within IPE that the field's progress depends not only on the accumulation of individual empirical findings but on the periodic, critical mapping of the intellectual terrain that gives those findings meaning and direction.

The paper's epistemological position reflects what Blyth (2009) characterizes as critical realism within IPE—the view that social structures are real and exert causal force independently of individual knowledge of them, while acknowledging that understanding those structures is always mediated through theoretical frameworks. This position enables the productive integration of insights from both the American and British schools of IPE—the former's emphasis on formal models and causal identification alongside the latter's commitment to historical depth and structural critique—without collapsing the methodologically important distinctions between them (Cohen, 2007). The paper does not adjudicate between these traditions; it argues that their creative combination is analytically necessary given the complexity of the phenomena under analysis.

3.2. Multi-Method Synthetic Strategy

The analysis employs three complementary methodological strategies. First, systematic synthetic literature review integrates peer-reviewed articles, academic monographs, and edited volumes published between 1970 and 2026, with particular emphasis on post-2019 scholarship directly engaging with contemporary structural transformations in global political economy. Second, comparative conceptual analysis follows the tradition of historical institutionalism in IPE (Cox, 1987; Gilpin, 1987), identifying patterns of convergence and divergence across institutional configurations and policy contexts that reveal the analytical limits of existing frameworks. Third, structured conceptual mapping employs twenty-three analytical tables and two original figures deployed throughout the paper as instruments for systematic comparison across dimensions that discursive analysis tends to handle unevenly and incompletely. Figure 1 depicts the integrated analytical logic of the study, linking the literature-review process to the identification of gaps and the construction of the research agenda.

3.3. Source Selection and Evaluation

The primary corpus comprises approximately 50 core scholarly works, selected from a larger review pool through a transparent filtering process. Source selection prioritized peer-reviewed publications in leading IPE and adjacent journals—including International Organization, International Security, Review of International Political Economy, Global Environmental Politics, Annual Review of Economics, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, International Affairs, and the Journal of International Economics—alongside foundational monographs from major university presses. Policy research from recognized institutional sources supplements the academic literature where contemporary policy debates are directly relevant to mapping research frontiers. Working papers and think-tank reports are included selectively where they represent the field's best current analytical thinking on rapidly evolving phenomena such as critical mineral geopolitics and digital monetary competition. All references were verified against publisher records, and digital object identifiers are provided wherever available.

3.4. Scope and Limitations

Several limitations require explicit acknowledgment. The selection of five research gaps is itself an analytical and interpretive choice that reflects the author's disciplinary vantage point; other configurations are possible and may carry equal justification. Synthetic analysis necessarily trades depth for breadth, and each gap examined here merits extended monographic treatment. The rapid pace of change in global political economy means that empirical patterns identified may evolve substantially between writing and publication. Most fundamentally, systematic literature review identifies patterns and maps frontiers; it does not establish causal claims, which require the experimental or quasi-experimental designs discussed by Spilker (2025). The paper's contributions are therefore offered as an analytical cartography of the field's research frontier, not as a set of empirically confirmed causal propositions.

4. Data Analysis and Results

Drawing on the methodological framework established in Section 3, this section maps the five foundational research gaps, evaluating the empirical and conceptual shifts identified in recent literature. Each gap is explored with reference to both established academic sources and emergent policy debates.

4.1. Gap One: The Retreat of Liberal Ontology and the Rise of Non-Liberal Orders

The challenge that non-liberal orders pose to mainstream IPE is, at its core, ontological rather than merely empirical. The dominant frameworks were not simply wrong about particular facts; they were organized around a vision of political economy reflecting the specific conditions of liberal hegemony. Understanding the contemporary moment requires theoretical tools that the liberal consensus was never designed to produce, and building those tools requires confronting the ontological presuppositions that have, often implicitly, organized the field's research programs (Hopewell, 2021; Weiss & Wallace, 2021).

China's economic model is the clearest and most consequential illustration of this challenge. Naughton (2021) demonstrates that the Chinese party-state has developed sophisticated instruments for coordinating market actors—state-owned enterprises, private firms, policy banks, and sovereign wealth funds—in pursuit of strategically defined national objectives. The “dual circulation” strategy, which simultaneously maintains engagement with global markets while systematically building indigenous technological capacity, represents a strategic logic that no existing IPE framework captures adequately. It is neither autarky nor liberal integration but something genuinely novel that demands new theoretical apparatus (Miller, 2022). Musacchio et al. (2015) document comparable dynamics across what they term new varieties of state capitalism—in the Gulf states, Russia, and a range of emerging economies—characterized by sophisticated management of the state–market boundary and strategic calibration of international economic engagement to serve domestic political-economic objectives rather than to converge toward liberal norms. Babic et al. (2020) extend this line of analysis by documenting how transnational state capital now operates across borders in ways that confound the foreign/domestic and state/market distinctions foundational to classical IPE.

Cooley and Nexon (2020) frame this development within a broader account of order contestation, arguing that the American-led international order faces not merely internal stress from domestic political backlash but the deliberate construction of parallel institutional frameworks by states seeking to reduce their exposure to liberal conditionality. Slobodian's (2018) intellectual history adds analytical depth by demonstrating that liberalism's apparent universalism was always a historically specific project with identifiable beneficiaries—a recognition that complicates both the narrative of liberal decline and the field's capacity to theorize alternatives. As shown in Table 4, the contrast between the ideal-typical characteristics of liberal and non-liberal economic orders extends across every dimension of economic governance, from property regimes to geopolitical posture.

The institutional expression of this contrast is equally consequential. Keohane and Nye (1977) demonstrated that complex interdependence transformed international politics by multiplying channels of contact between states and reducing the utility of military force. Farrell and Newman (2019, 2023) have since shown, with analytical precision, how this same interdependence becomes a weapon when states control central network nodes. Their framework distinguishes panopticon effects—the extraction of information through network centrality—from chokepoint effects—coercive leverage through control of network bottlenecks. This is an important theoretical advance, but it leaves open the equally critical question of how non-liberal states are constructing the parallel institutional architecture needed to reduce their exposure to these vulnerabilities over time (McDowell, 2023). Recent empirical work adds an important nuance to the parallel-order thesis: analyzing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank's lending practices, Daßler et al. (2026) demonstrate that contender institutions cooperate extensively with incumbent multilateral development banks even while positioning themselves as alternatives—suggesting that institutional contestation and institutional accommodation are not mutually exclusive strategies but complementary instruments of gradual order transformation. Table 5 contrasts the institutional logics at stake.

The research frontiers exposed by this first gap are substantial. IPE lacks a systematic theory of non-liberal institutional logic comparable in analytical power to Keohane's (1984) theory of regimes; adequate tools for analyzing how party-state structures shape innovation patterns, firm behavior, and international economic engagement (Weiss & Wallace, 2021); and the theoretical infrastructure needed to analyze how the coexistence of liberal and non-liberal orders shapes the prospects for selective cooperation in domains—climate, pandemic response, financial stability—where global coordination remains indispensable.

4.2. Gap Two: The Material Politics of Climate Change and the Green Transition

The green transition is not a sectoral policy adjustment or an environmental management challenge. It represents a transformation of the material basis of the global economy—a wholesale reconfiguration of energy systems, production processes, and resource dependencies that will reshape interstate power relations as profoundly as the historical transition from wood to coal transformed the nineteenth-century international order (Newell, 2021). IPE has been slow to recognize the full structural significance of this transformation, and the resulting analytical deficit is consequential for both scholarship and policy.

Allan et al. (2021) documents how the climate imperative is driving the emergence of green industrial policy as a central instrument of economic statecraft—a development that cuts across conventional analytical boundaries between environmental politics, trade policy, and national security strategy in ways that existing subfield boundaries make genuinely difficult to analyze. Aklin and Mildenberger (2020) offer an essential corrective to standard collective-action accounts of climate politics by emphasizing distributional conflict—the structured struggle between winners and losers from the energy transition—as the primary obstacle to effective climate policy, refocusing analytical attention from international negotiations to domestic political economy. This reframing has important methodological implications: it suggests that understanding climate politics requires the same distributional analysis that Lake (2009) associates with open economy politics, applied to a new and more urgent policy domain. As shown in Table 6, the geopolitical transition from hydrocarbon dependence to critical mineral dependence constitutes one of the most structurally consequential dimensions of the green transition for IPE.

The pattern visible in Table 6 acquires sharper definition when disaggregated by mineral. Bridge and Faigen (2022) argue that analysis must move beyond linear supply chain metaphors toward a production-network perspective that captures the intersecting strategies of mining firms, battery manufacturers, automakers, and states. Riofrancos (2023) adds a critical political dimension, documenting how Global North governments now justify the onshoring of extraction through a security–sustainability nexus—an interlocking set of policies and justifications that promote domestic mining while emphasizing its environmental credentials. Table 7 maps supply chain vulnerabilities across the critical minerals essential to decarbonization, revealing a pattern of structural dependency that parallels hydrocarbon-era vulnerabilities while presenting distinctive governance challenges.

The concentration of critical mineral processing in China creates structural dependencies for the green transition that mirror hydrocarbon-era oil dependencies in important respects—but with less geographic diversification of production and in a context of sharper geopolitical rivalry and reduced institutional mechanisms for cooperative management (International Energy Agency, 2023; Miller, 2022). Ross's (2012) resource curse analysis provides partial guidance, but it was constructed around hydrocarbons and requires substantial adaptation for the governance challenges of transition minerals, which differ in their extraction economics, supply chain organization, and geopolitical significance (Bridge & Faigen, 2022). Equally consequential is the distributional dimension as shown in Table 8, the burdens of decarbonization fall asymmetrically between the Global North and the Global South, making climate politics inseparable from the politics of development, debt, and historical responsibility (Roberts & Parks, 2007).

Rodrik (2022) argues persuasively that industrial policy has returned as a mainstream instrument across both advanced and developing economies, driven by the convergence of security concerns, climate imperatives, and technological competition. The economics profession has followed: Juhász et al. (2024) synthesize a rapidly expanding empirical literature demonstrating that the analytically productive questions now concern the design, targeting, and political economy of industrial policy rather than its legitimacy—a shift with profound implications for IPE, which had largely ceded industrial policy analysis to development economics after the 1990s. Table 9 captures the diversity of contemporary industrial policy forms, each of which embeds a distinct configuration of climate, security, and developmental objectives.

4.3. Gap Three: The Return of War and the Re-Militarization of Economics

IPE was intellectually shaped by a period in which the de-securitization of economic relations seemed both descriptively accurate and normatively desirable. The discipline's research agenda reflected this context: trade liberalization, financial integration, and institutional design occupied center stage, while questions of interstate military conflict were largely bracketed as the province of security studies. This division of intellectual labor was never theoretically defensible, but it held for a generation (Farrell & Newman, 2023).

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 made the arrangement analytically untenable. The Western response was primarily economic in character: unprecedented financial sanctions coordinated across the G7, technology export controls targeting Russian defense industries, energy embargoes that restructured European energy markets at enormous cost, and the unprecedented freezing of central bank foreign exchange reserves held in Western financial systems (Tooze, 2021). These were not peripheral measures complementing a military strategy; they were the primary instruments through which Western states chose to engage, and their effectiveness became a central question for statecraft. The structure of global economic networks—and the vulnerabilities that structure creates for states on the wrong side of network asymmetries—moved decisively to the center of great-power competition (Drezner et al., 2021; Farrell & Newman, 2019). The institutional response has been equally consequential: Bauerle Danzman and Meunier (2024) show that even the European Union, long a laggard in strategic economic policy, has undergone a geoeconomic turn, constructing novel instruments for investment screening and anti-coercion at remarkable speed. Table 10 maps the principal mechanisms through which economics has been re-militarized in the contemporary period.

These mechanisms have generated a corresponding repertoire of state strategies for managing the structural tension between economic efficiency and strategic security. As shown in Table 11, the decoupling strategies being pursued across the Atlantic and among U.S. partners in the Indo-Pacific range from comprehensive severance to calibrated de-risking, each carrying distinct costs and political constraints.

Drezner's (1999) foundational analysis of the sanction’s paradox—developed when sanctions were primarily bilateral measures aimed at relatively limited objectives—provides essential but insufficient theoretical resources for the coalition-based, comprehensive sanctions regimes that characterize the contemporary era (McDowell, 2023). Table 12 traces the historical evolution of sanctions as instruments of statecraft, making visible the qualitative shift that the Ukraine case represents.

The pattern visible in Table 12 reveals something IPE has been slow to theorize systematically: contemporary sanctions regimes are no longer primarily instruments of bilateral coercive diplomacy. They function increasingly as mechanisms of geopolitical bloc formation—devices through which states signal alignment, consolidate coalitions, and sort the international system into antagonistic groupings (Farrell & Newman, 2023). This order-making function is analytically distinct from, and arguably more consequential than, the coercive function that the sanctions literature has traditionally emphasized. Crucially, its effects are now measurable: Gopinath et al. (2025) estimate that trade between countries in geopolitically distant blocs has declined by roughly 12% relative to intra-bloc trade since the invasion of Ukraine, with foreign direct investment declining by roughly 20%—magnitudes that remain modest by Cold War standards but that indicate fragmentation has become an empirical trajectory rather than a rhetorical anxiety. Figure 2 visualizes the structural entanglement among the five identified gaps, highlighting the feedback mechanisms—several of which run through the sanctions–finance and minerals–trade channels documented in this section—that make compartmentalized analysis analytically inadequate.

4.4. Gap Four: Digital Sovereignty and the Intangible Economy

IPE's conceptual vocabulary was built for a world of tangible things—containers crossing borders, factories producing goods, workers earning wages from physical labor. These are not obsolete realities, but they are no longer the primary sites of value creation in advanced economies. Haskel and Westlake (2017) document the remarkable and systematic shift toward intangible capital—data, algorithms, intellectual property, brand equity, and organizational knowledge—as the dominant form of productive asset in contemporary capitalism. This shift fundamentally reorganizes the logic of competition, the structure of monopoly, the meaning of ownership, and the capacity of states to regulate economic activity within their territorial boundaries (Kalyanpur & Newman, 2019).

Srnicek (2017) demonstrates that the dominant business models of the contemporary digital economy are organized around the extraction and control of data as a form of capital, generating winner-take-all dynamics that defy antitrust frameworks developed for industrial-era competition. Zuboff (2019) extends this analysis through her concept of surveillance capitalism, identifying a new economic logic in which behavioral prediction products derived from unilateral data extraction constitute the primary commodity of platform firms. Couldry and Mejias (2019) situate these dynamics within a broader account of data colonialism, arguing that the systematic extraction of behavioral data from Global South populations mirrors colonial resource extraction in important structural respects, creating dependencies that industrial-era developmental state strategies cannot address. Aggarwal and Reddie (2021) synthesize these concerns within a framework of techno-nationalism, documenting how digital economic competition is increasingly managed through security-framed interventions that fracture global markets along geopolitical lines. As shown in Table 13, the transition from tangible to intangible economic organization reaches into every one of IPE's analytical categories.

Power in the digital economy operates through mechanisms that existing IPE frameworks were not designed to analyze. Strange's (1988) structural power—the capacity to set the rules within which others must operate—is clearly operative in the digital sphere, but it functions through private actors (Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Tencent, ByteDance) in ways that confound the state-centric assumptions of classical power analysis (Kalyanpur & Newman, 2019). Table 14 maps the varieties of digital power now operating in the global political economy, distinguishing the infrastructural, algorithmic, data, platform, and narrative modalities through which it is exercised.

The developmental implications of this transformation are equally profound. The classic developmental state succeeded by mastering the technologies of the industrial era—coordinating investment, disciplining firms, and climbing the manufacturing value chain (Wade, 1990). The platform economy disrupts every element of that playbook: value accrues to network owners rather than manufacturers, technological capability resides in proprietary algorithms and data rather than transferable production processes, and the infrastructure of participation is controlled by a handful of foreign firms. Table 15 contrasts the industrialization-era and platform-economy-era development paradigms, revealing why the developmental state model requires fundamental conceptual revision for the contemporary period.

States have not remained passive before these challenges, but their responses have diverged sharply, reflecting differences in regulatory philosophy, market structure, and geopolitical position. The resulting fragmentation of digital governance carries significant implications for trade in digital services, investment in digital infrastructure, and the broader geopolitics of data. As shown in Table 16, the major jurisdictions have consolidated distinct—and in important respects incompatible—regulatory models, a divergence that itself constitutes an emerging site of geoeconomic competition.

4.5. Gap Five: Re-Centering the Political in Global Finance

The 2008 global financial crisis prompted a welcome expansion of IPE scholarship on finance and financial governance. Yet the dominant post-crisis analytical frame—macroprudential supervision and systemic financial stability—carried a significant and largely unacknowledged limitation: it kept financial governance within the boundaries of technical economic management, treating finance as a domain to be calibrated through regulatory instruments rather than as a deeply political arena in which distributional conflicts, geopolitical rivalries, and questions of democratic accountability are permanently and consequentially at stake (Starrs, 2019).

Tooze (2018, 2021) demonstrated that the financial crisis and its pandemic-era sequel reshaped political possibilities in ways that the macroprudential frame was not designed to capture—that the intimate connections among financial markets, state power, and democratic legitimacy were real and operational, not merely rhetorical. Helleiner (2014) showed that the reform of global financial governance preserved the basic architecture of financial globalization while redistributing its costs in ways that reflected political power rather than economic logic. More recently, Helleiner (2021) has excavated the autarkic intellectual traditions that shaped pre-1945 political economy, demonstrating that ideas of national economic self-sufficiency—long dismissed as atavistic—offer important analytical resources for understanding contemporary retrenchment from financial globalization. These contributions set the terms for a more politically attentive financial IPE, but the research agenda they implied has been only partially pursued. Table 17 maps the shift from post-2008 preoccupations to the contemporary research frontiers demanding urgent analytical attention.

Among those frontiers, the distributional politics of monetary policy stands out for the disproportion between its social significance and its scholarly neglect. A decade and a half of balance-sheet expansion, followed by the sharpest tightening cycle in four decades, has redistributed wealth and income on a scale that rivals major fiscal programs—yet these effects continue to be analyzed primarily as technical questions of transmission rather than political questions of who gains and who loses (Norrlöf, 2020; Tooze, 2018). As shown in Table 18, each major instrument of monetary policy embeds a distinct distributional structure, with identifiable beneficiaries, losers, and transmission mechanisms.

Eichengreen's (2011) canonical account of the dollar's exorbitant privilege—the structural advantage the United States derives from issuing the primary global reserve currency—identifies a foundation that is now being actively and deliberately eroded by the weaponization of dollar-denominated financial infrastructure for strategic purposes (McDowell, 2023; Norrlöf, 2020). The empirical record increasingly supports this diagnosis: Arslanalp et al. (2022) document a gradual but persistent decline in the dollar's share of global reserves, driven not by a single challenger currency but by active diversification into nontraditional reserve currencies—a pattern of stealth erosion that conventional bipolar narratives of dollar–renminbi competition fail to capture. Table 19 tracks de-dollarization indicators and the development of alternative monetary arrangements over the 2015–2025 period.

Digital monetary innovation compounds these dynamics by multiplying the technological pathways through which states can reduce their dependence on dollar-based infrastructure (Prasad, 2021). As shown in Table 20, national responses to cryptocurrencies and digital assets range from outright prohibition to strategic embrace, and each response type encodes a distinct political-economic calculation about monetary sovereignty, financial stability, and geopolitical exposure.

The politics of sovereign debt completes this picture of finance–geopolitics entanglement. The architecture through which distressed sovereigns restructure their obligations—once dominated by the Paris Club and the International Monetary Fund—has fragmented as Chinese policy banks have become the largest official creditors to much of the developing world, frequently on undisclosed terms (Horn et al., 2021). As shown in Table 21, this reconfiguration has slowed crisis resolution, complicated burden-sharing, and opened a new arena in which creditor coordination failures carry systemic consequences for climate finance and development alike (Volz, 2018).

5. Discussion

Having mapped the five foundational research gaps in Section 4, the analysis now turns from diagnosis to synthesis. The purpose of this discussion is threefold: to demonstrate that the gaps are not discrete deficits but mutually constitutive features of a single conjuncture; to argue that addressing them requires methodological pluralism; and to draw out the policy and governance implications that follow—reframing the gaps as an integrated research agenda rather than a checklist of subfield omissions.

5.1. The Structural Coherence of the Contemporary Moment

The five gaps have been analyzed sequentially throughout Section 4, but the analytical separation is a methodological convenience rather than an empirical description. In practice, these dynamics are deeply and consequentially entangled in the workings of contemporary global political economy, and understanding the entanglement is as analytically important as understanding each gap individually (see Figure 2).

The most structurally significant entanglement connects geopolitical rivalry (Gap One), resource competition (Gap Two), and economic coercion (Gap Three) through the domain of critical minerals and clean technology competition. The United States and China are simultaneously competing for control over the supply chains essential to decarbonization—lithium processing capacity, cobalt sourcing, rare earth production, polysilicon fabrication—and for dominance in the clean technology industries that will define economic and strategic positions for decades (Bridge & Faigen, 2022; Miller, 2022; Newell, 2021). This competition is simultaneously a climate issue, a trade issue, a security issue, and a development issue. No existing analytical framework encompasses its full dimensions; it requires the kind of cross-domain synthesis that IPE's subfield organization has historically been structurally ill-suited to produce. The measured fragmentation of trade and investment flows along geopolitical lines (Gopinath et al., 2025) indicates that these entanglements are already reshaping the aggregate structure of the world economy rather than merely its rhetorical framing.

The digital transformation (Gap Four) cuts across all other gaps in equally important ways. Digital infrastructure is simultaneously an instrument of sanctions enforcement and, increasingly, an avenue for sanctions evasion (Gap Three; McDowell, 2023). Platform governance determines the conditions of participation in an intangible economy for developing states (Gap Two; Couldry & Mejias, 2019). The development of central bank digital currencies is simultaneously a monetary sovereignty project and a digital governance initiative with potentially significant implications for reserve currency competition (Gaps Four and Five; Prasad, 2021). Chinese digital industrial policy pursues technological self-reliance while maintaining export competitiveness—a strategy that exemplifies the entanglement of non-liberal order construction with digital transformation (Gaps One and Four; Aggarwal & Reddie, 2021).

Finance (Gap Five) permeates the other four gaps. The weaponization of dollar-denominated financial infrastructure accelerates de-dollarization and incentivizes the construction of alternative payment systems, creating new channels for sanctions circumvention and accelerating central bank digital currency development (Arslanalp et al., 2022; Norrlöf, 2020). Climate finance architecture—or its chronic inadequacy—mediates the distributional politics of the green transition, determining whether developing economies can afford to decarbonize without sacrificing development goals or accumulating unsustainable debt (Horn et al., 2021; Volz, 2018). Private equity and asset management shape the investment flows that determine which clean technologies are commercially deployed, in which countries, and at what speed—political-economic choices dressed in the language of portfolio management (Starrs, 2019).

These structural interconnections argue for a research agenda that takes seriously the systemic coherence of the contemporary moment—the way in which great-power rivalry, climate transition, economic re-militarization, digital transformation, and financial geopolitics reinforce and condition one another. Analyzing these phenomena in separated specialist silos produces insights that are locally coherent but globally misleading.

5.2. The Methodological Imperative for Pluralism

The five gaps cannot be adequately addressed within any single methodological tradition. Stating this plainly matters because it runs against tendencies in American IPE toward methodological orthodoxy—the privileging of formal modeling, causal identification, and large-N quantitative analysis (Cohen, 2007). These are valuable tools; the rigor they impose is real and consequential. But the phenomena at stake in all five gaps genuinely exceed what any single approach can capture, and insisting otherwise produces not rigor but a form of analytical tunnel vision—the appearance of precision applied to the wrong questions. Table 22 maps the methodological requirements for addressing each gap, demonstrating why pluralism is a practical analytical necessity rather than an intellectual concession to diversity.

As Spilker (2025) demonstrates, experimental methods have gained significant traction in IPE for establishing causal identification, but they are most analytically powerful when combined with qualitative insights that illuminate the mechanisms and contextual conditions that experiments cannot directly observe. The field's graduate training structures and leading journals need to reflect this reality more deliberately and systematically than they currently do—valuing research designs that combine methods appropriate to complex, multi-causal phenomena rather than rewarding methodological purity.

5.3. Policy and Governance Implications

The research gaps analyzed in this paper carry direct implications for the policymakers and international civil servants navigating terrain that academic frameworks have not yet adequately mapped. Three implications stand out as particularly urgent.

First, the asymmetric burdens of the green transition demand financial architectures—climate finance mechanisms at genuinely transformative scale, credible debt relief instruments for climate-vulnerable states, and technology transfer arrangements with real intellectual property dimensions—that go substantially beyond what existing multilateral frameworks currently provide (Newell & Mulvaney, 2013; Volz, 2018). The current gap between climate finance pledges and disbursements is not merely a technical financing problem; it is a political-economic failure with distributional consequences that Roberts and Parks (2007) characterize as a fundamental climate injustice.

Second, the weaponization of economic interdependence creates a structural governance dilemma: the aggressive use of economic coercion to pursue security objectives progressively erodes the institutional infrastructure on which economic cooperation in other domains—climate, pandemic response, financial stability—depends (Farrell & Newman, 2023). The rapid institutionalization of economic security instruments, exemplified by the European Union's geoeconomic turn (Bauerle Danzman & Meunier, 2024), demonstrates how quickly defensive measures can acquire bureaucratic momentum of their own. Managing this tension requires analytical frameworks that IPE has not yet fully developed.

Third, the entanglement of geopolitics and the dollar's reserve currency status demands creative approaches to international monetary cooperation that can address dollar fragility without triggering the financial fragmentation that would make global economic governance even more difficult (Eichengreen, 2011; McDowell, 2023; Prasad, 2021). The apparent equilibrium of dollar centrality is structurally more fragile than commonly assumed—the diversification documented by Arslanalp et al. (2022) is gradual but directionally consistent—and the policy community requires analytical tools that recognize the risk of non-linear transitions rather than assuming indefinite continuity.

6. Conclusion

International Political Economy stands at an uncomfortable but intellectually productive juncture. The theoretical frameworks developed during the long liberal moment, the three decades between the Cold War's end and the compounding crises of the 2010s—offered genuinely powerful analytical tools for understanding a world organized around economic openness, institutionalized interstate cooperation, and the apparent subordination of geopolitical competition to market rationality. That world is now in question, and the tools calculated for it are struggling to keep pace with structural changes they were not designed to anticipate.

This paper has argued that IPE confronts five foundational research gaps—concerning non-liberal orders, the material politics of climate change, the re-militarization of economics, digital sovereignty and the intangible economy, and the political dimensions of global finance—each representing not merely a new empirical domain but a genuine challenge to the ontological and epistemological commitments that have organized the field over five decades. These gaps are interconnected in ways that reward multi-dimensional, cross-subfield analysis and resist the compartmentalized approaches that conventional disciplinary organization tends to produce. They share a methodological requirement: they can be adequately addressed only through genuinely pluralistic research programs that combine formal modeling, quantitative analysis, historical institutionalism, comparative case methods, and critical theory in productive and mutually informing combination.

The twenty-three analytical tables and two figures integrated throughout this paper are offered as a working cartography of intellectual territory requiring far more systematic exploration than any single synthetic review can provide. Each gap identified here merits extended monographic treatment; the synthesis undertaken in these pages necessarily sacrifices depth for breadth. But breadth is itself an analytical contribution: the argument that these five gaps are structurally interconnected, and that addressing them requires both theoretical ambition and methodological openness, constitutes a substantive claim about where the field needs to go.

The liberal horizon that shaped IPE for three decades has not entirely disappeared. Normative ideals of open economies, rules-based cooperation, and democratic accountability retain both analytical traction and political relevance in a world where their alternatives are becoming more visible and more powerful. But they can no longer function as unexamined background assumptions that give the field's questions their shape before the analysis begins. The world that IPE seeks to explain is more complex, more contested, and more dangerous than the liberal paradigm anticipated. Confronting that complexity honestly—with appropriate theoretical humility, genuine methodological pluralism, and sustained attention to the structural forces reshaping the global political economy—is simultaneously the defining intellectual challenge and the defining opportunity facing the field today.

7. Recommendations for Further Research

The analysis presented in this paper suggests several specific research priorities that the IPE scholarly community should pursue with intellectual urgency. Table 23 provides a structured overview of these priorities mapped against each of the five gaps identified.

7.1. Specific Theoretical Priorities

Three theoretical developments deserve priority given their intellectual urgency and practical policy relevance.

First, IPE urgently needs a systematic theory of non-liberal institutional logics—one that can analyze the governance architecture, behavioral incentives, international implications, and developmental performance of state capitalist systems with the analytical rigor and empirical precision that Keohane (1984) brought to the study of liberal institutions. Such a theory needs to account for the diversity within the non-liberal category—distinguishing among Chinese party-state capitalism, Gulf sovereign wealth capitalism, Russian oligarchic state capitalism, and the various developmental state variants across East and Southeast Asia—while identifying the structural features that distinguish non-liberal institutional logics from their liberal counterparts (Babic et al., 2020; Weiss & Wallace, 2021). The evidence that contender institutions blend competition with pragmatic cooperation (Daßler et al., 2026) suggests that such a theory must accommodate hybridity rather than assume institutional antagonism.

Second, a theory of digital sovereignty adequate to the analytical challenges of the contemporary moment should specify how different configurations of state regulatory capacity, private platform power, and geopolitical positioning shape national outcomes in the digital economy—connecting the macro-structural analysis of Srnicek (2017) and Zuboff (2019) with the institutional specificity of comparative political economy and the developmental concerns of the Global South. Couldry and Mejias's (2019) data colonialism framework is an important starting point, but it requires translation into the institutional categories and causal mechanisms that IPE employs (Kalyanpur & Newman, 2019).

Third, the field needs a theory of sanctions as ordering mechanisms that builds on Drezner's (1999) foundational analysis while extending it to account for the coalition dynamics, bloc-formation functions, and international monetary system implications of contemporary comprehensive sanctions regimes (Drezner et al., 2021; Farrell & Newman, 2023). Understanding why the threat of exclusion from the dollar-based financial system has simultaneously pushed targeted states toward constructing alternative monetary infrastructure while also consolidating alignment among states willing to bear the costs of sanctions participation is one of the most consequential and analytically challenging questions in contemporary IPE (McDowell, 2023).

7.2. Empirical Priorities

Beyond theoretical development, the field requires sustained empirical investment in several underdeveloped research sites. These include longitudinal mapping of Chinese state-owned enterprise behavior in host countries across multiple sectors; systematic cross-national panel data on critical mineral supply chain restructuring; granular studies of post-2022 central bank asset diversification strategies, extending the reserve-composition evidence assembled by Arslanalp et al. (2022); comparative platform governance outcome studies across advanced, emerging, and Global South economies; and political-economic analyses of the distributional consequences of central bank balance sheet policies during the 2020–2024 inflationary cycle. Each of these empirical projects demands data infrastructure that currently does not exist at the scale required for robust cumulative findings.

7.3. Institutional and Pedagogical Recommendations

Several structural recommendations follow from the paper's analysis. First, leading IPE journals should more actively solicit and reward research designs that combine complementary methods, rather than implicitly privileging the methodological traditions dominant in particular national scholarly communities; the transatlantic divide that Cohen (2007) documented has real costs for the field's collective analytical capacity. Second, graduate training should more systematically develop interdisciplinary fluency—in environmental politics, security studies, science and technology studies, and development economics—given that the five research frontiers identified here all sit across subfield boundaries that conventional curricula rarely bridge. Third, the field's relationship with policy communities should be cultivated in ways that maintain critical distance and theoretical ambition while ensuring that policy-relevant insights reach audiences capable of acting on them.