TY - JOUR
T1 - Back to Dakar
T2 - Decolonizing international political economy through dependency theory
AU - Antunes de Oliveira, Felipe
AU - Kvangraven, Ingrid Harvold
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Max Ajl, Martín Arboleda, Ronald Chilcote, Cristobal Kay, Stefan Ouma, Thomas Patriota, and Clara Ruvituso for generously sharing their memories, ideas, and sources about the 1972 Dakar Conference, for sharing information on other radical political economy conferences in the Global South in that period, and/or for providing comments on various parts of the paper. Thanks also to the participants of the 15th European International Studies Association Pan-European Conference on International Relations in Athens, the 24th Association for Heterodox Economics Annual Conference in London, the 12th Annual International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy Conference in Bologna, and the 2nd Conference on African Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in Dakar for their feedback and suggestions. The authors take responsibility for any eventual mistakes.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2023/3/13
Y1 - 2023/3/13
N2 - Whereas the field of International Political Economy (IPE) included a diversity of voices at its outset, histories of the field tend to marginalize certain contributions - particularly those from the Global South. The endeavor to decolonize IPE offers an opportunity to look back at IPE’s history, re-discover the marginalized voices, and imagine new possible futures. This article engages with contemporary calls to decolonize IPE and proposes an alternative route to do so by recovering dependency theory. We argue that dependency theory can be conceptualized as a peripheral IPE perspective that was committed to thinking from the Global South and to producing politically engaged scholarship just as the field was being formed. The article elaborates on the key tenets of dependency theory, contrasting it with mainstream IPE, and putting it in dialogue with decolonial approaches. To demonstrate the simultaneous non-Eurocentric, anti-colonial, and policy-oriented potential of dependency theory, we recover a foundational moment that disciplinary histories of IPE have forgotten: the 1972 Dakar conference, organized by Samir Amin, with the participation of leading Latin American and African dependency scholars.
AB - Whereas the field of International Political Economy (IPE) included a diversity of voices at its outset, histories of the field tend to marginalize certain contributions - particularly those from the Global South. The endeavor to decolonize IPE offers an opportunity to look back at IPE’s history, re-discover the marginalized voices, and imagine new possible futures. This article engages with contemporary calls to decolonize IPE and proposes an alternative route to do so by recovering dependency theory. We argue that dependency theory can be conceptualized as a peripheral IPE perspective that was committed to thinking from the Global South and to producing politically engaged scholarship just as the field was being formed. The article elaborates on the key tenets of dependency theory, contrasting it with mainstream IPE, and putting it in dialogue with decolonial approaches. To demonstrate the simultaneous non-Eurocentric, anti-colonial, and policy-oriented potential of dependency theory, we recover a foundational moment that disciplinary histories of IPE have forgotten: the 1972 Dakar conference, organized by Samir Amin, with the participation of leading Latin American and African dependency scholars.
KW - anti-colonialism
KW - decolonial theory
KW - decolonizing IPE
KW - Dependency theory
KW - Eurocentrism
KW - imperialism
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85150655258&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/09692290.2023.2169322
DO - 10.1080/09692290.2023.2169322
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85150655258
SN - 0969-2290
VL - 30
SP - 1676
EP - 1700
JO - REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
JF - REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
IS - 5
ER -