Juanita Elias

• University of Warwick

The field of International Political Economy (IPE) has changed considerably since the inception of the Review of International Political Economy (RIPE). This 30th anniversary editorial reflects on how these changes have impacted the journal’s publications over the past ten years. Some trends are promising. RIPE has become more gender inclusive, as...

This chapter assesses feminist international political economy (IPE) insights about care. It begins by discussing military spouses and the vital everyday role that their care labour plays in sustaining the military as an institution. The chapter then looks at three interrelated debates that show the importance of care in everyday IPE: feminist work...

This chapter discusses the ambiguous subject of humour in the everyday politics of globalization. It begins by drawing out three related concepts of resistance, carnival, and subversion to reflect on how joking and pranks can critique, but also reproduce, the inequalities and exclusions of market life. The chapter then analyses the ethical, social,...

This chapter examines the topic of food in everyday international political economy (IPE). It primarily focuses on the international trade of agricultural commodities and its developmental implications within the Global South. It explains the concepts of governmentality and the global value chain. The chapter begins by looking at corporate brands b...

This chapter studies the relatively new topic of sharing economy in international political economy (IPE), describing the concepts of marketization of everyday life, the gig economy, and platform capitalism. It begins by looking at ride-sharing, which is an increasingly popular means of transport that constitutes a significant sector in the for-pro...

This concluding chapter summarizes the key aspects of international political economy (IPE). IPE can be described as the study of global systems of production, exchange, and distribution, with a view to understanding what these mean for the basic values of wealth, security, freedom, and justice. This book connects this academic field and its animat...

This chapter addresses the concept of the global city in international political economy (IPE), relating it to changes in the international financial system. It begins by looking at mega-events like the Olympic Games. The chapter shows how these are used in place branding strategies adopted by host cities, how they drive urban transformation throug...

This chapter focuses on the key themes of money and finance in international political economy (IPE) analysis. It describes the concepts of commodification, assetization, and financialization, and how they apply to the case of student debt. In many countries, borrowing money to pay for tuition fees and living costs is an expected part of going to u...

I-PEEL: The International Political Economy of Everyday Life locates the study of international political economy (IPE) in the context of everyday life. It provides a fresh introduction to IPE, and highlights the relevance and prominence of IPE in the real world. In addition, the text establishes the conceptual and theoretical techniques required t...

This chapter explores the increasing significance of social media in international political economy (IPE). How we experience and represent social media has profound implications for the ethical possibilities and limits of global market life. The chapter begins by problematizing social media through the related concepts of self-branding, the attent...

This chapter discusses the topic of clothing in everyday international political economy (IPE). It begins by looking at how the garment industry and workers in that industry have been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing in particular on the vulnerabilities faced by women workers in Leicester. This analysis introduces the concepts of fast fa...

This article presents an investigation into the racialized and gendered dynamics of the intensifying crisis in care for older people in the United Kingdom. Deploying a feminist political economy framework, we reveal how the care crisis is an intersectional crisis of social reproduction worsened by both austerity and COVID-19. We do this through an...

This chapter considers what it means to focus on gender in analysing the political economy of Southeast Asian development. Drawing on examples from across the region, it uncovers the role that women in Southeast Asia play in both economic production and social reproduction. It shows that development planning is rooted in assumptions about the avail...

It goes without saying that feminist International Political Economy (IPE) is concerned in one way or another with the everyday – conceptualised as both a site of political struggle and a site within which social relations are (re)produced and governed. Given the longstanding grounding of feminist research in everyday gendered experiences, many wou...

Southeast Asian cities have long been produced as the ‘exemplary centres’ of the region, shaped in various and overlapping ways by the imperial gaze, nationalist visions (and their democratised versions), and by the familiar blueprints of international capital. Through such exemplary visions, the region’s cities have been designed to cultivate coll...

The dispossession of urban communities across class and racial lines is a global phenomenon linked to the expansion of international investment in the development of ‘exemplary’ city space. However, city evictions are also historically-informed and gendered processes which are continuous with past colonial and postcolonial urban rationalisation pro...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) do, at leaost on a rhetorical level, tie countries and other development actors to a rights-based vision of development, which expressly includes labour rights, migrant rights and women’s rights. Despite this, sex workers continue to migrate and work in the margins where rights are difficult to claim. In loo...

This Handbook brings together leading interdisciplinary scholarship on the gendered nature of the international political economy. Spanning a wide range of theoretical traditions and empirical foci, it explores the multifaceted ways in which gender relations constitute and are shaped by global politico-economic processes. It further interrogates th...

This chapter explores why it is that women’s organizations seek to engage rights-based approaches in contexts where activists are conscious of the limitations of human rights activism for delivering meaningful outcomes for women. I explores this puzzle through the example of the Malaysian women’s advocacy group EMPOWER who produced the 2011 Malaysi...

The diverse collection of short reflections included in this Critical Perspectives section looks to continue a conversation—a conversation that played out in the pages of this journal (Elias 2015) regarding the relationship between two strands of feminist international relations scholarship: feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist internationa...

Focussing on the example of domestic worker migration, this article seeks to explore the regulatory regimes that control the flow of migrants across Southeast Asia. Although at first glance this appears to be a deeply statist regime, the aim of this article is to complicate this picture and to look at the role that private power and authority place...

This intervention shares images and stories from the women evictees in Jakarta who collectively give voice to the psychic, physical, and material injuries inflicted by state dispossession in the city. Engaging Ann Laura Stoler's (2013) language to expose the politics of ruination and preservation, we illustrate the gendered nature of the remaking o...

In this empirically rich collection of essays, a team of leading international scholars explore the way that economic transformation is sustained and challenged by everyday practices across Southeast Asia. Drawing together a body of interdisciplinary scholarship, the authors explore how the emergence of more marketized forms of economic policy-maki...

In this empirically rich collection of essays, a team of leading international scholars explore the way that economic transformation is sustained and challenged by everyday practices across Southeast Asia. Drawing together a body of interdisciplinary scholarship, the authors explore how the emergence of more marketized forms of economic policy-maki...

In this empirically rich collection of essays, a team of leading international scholars explore the way that economic transformation is sustained and challenged by everyday practices across Southeast Asia. Drawing together a body of interdisciplinary scholarship, the authors explore how the emergence of more marketized forms of economic policy-maki...

In this empirically rich collection of essays, a team of leading international scholars explore the way that economic transformation is sustained and challenged by everyday practices across Southeast Asia. Drawing together a body of interdisciplinary scholarship, the authors explore how the emergence of more marketized forms of economic policy-maki...

Feminist studies of political economy have long pointed to the multifaceted ways in which global transformations are constituted by deeply gendered economic practices at the everyday level. Nonetheless, the increased analytical focus on the everyday within the study of international political economy (IPE) frequently fails to connect with feminist...

The article considers how the employment of domestic workers by middle-class Malaysian households has been thrown into flux by the imposition of bans on the sending of workers by states such as Indonesia and Cambodia, as well as the decline in numbers of women seeking employment as domestic workers in Malaysia and rising employment costs. This arti...

This short commentary aims to think through the need to return to a more “integrated” feminist IR through a focus on some of the ways in which feminist political economy (FPE) scholars, such as ourselves, might better integrate a focus on gendered forms and practices of violence into our analysis. We do this via an intervention into debates about t...

The essays here reflect on the need to rebuild bridges between two key strands of feminist International Relations (IR) scholarship: feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist (international) political economy (FPE/FIPE). As many of the contributions to this section point out, feminist IR scholarship has long emphasized how gender relations and i...

Malaysian government planning and policy-making have increasingly come to recognise the role of women and the household in the promotion of a number of strategies aimed at enhancing economic competitiveness. Government planning documents emphasise the need to boost women's labour market participation, increase women's levels of entrepreneurship, an...

Why do activist groups representing some of society’s most marginalised employ legalistic forms of “rights talk” when the reality of securing rights via the judicial system is almost unimaginable? The article considers this question in relation to the work of the Malaysian non-governmental organisation (NGO) EMPOWER which, in 2012, produced the Mal...

In 2009, following numerous high profile abuse cases, the Indonesian government placed a moratorium on its citizens taking up employment in Malaysia as domestic workers. From the perspective of feminist International Relations, the emergence of migrant domestic work as a foreign policy concern between these two states is significant – exposing a re...

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is a global governance actor that has in recent years taken an increased interest in issues pertaining to gender equality and women's empowerment. The paper critically investigates the work of the WEF in this area, suggesting that WEF-produced gender and development discourse is profoundly compatible with the politics...

In Malaysia, the ready availability of low-cost female workers from Indonesia combined with the increased presence of women in the workforce has led to a situation in which domestic workers are ubiquitous in middle-class households. However, in 2009, responding to domestic outrage over the treatment of Indonesian migrant domestic workers, the Indon...

The contributors in this volume have examined how the household has been central to Asia’s economic transformation. Historically, households have never existed outside of capitalist relations, a point exemplified in an early study of Indian workers: Maria Mies’s The Lace Makers of Narsapur (1982). Drawing on research conducted in India, Mies sought...

Across Asia, from the 1960s onward, significant changes took place in relation to women’s roles and their position in society. Largely driven by the region’s ongoing incorporation into the global capitalist economy, these changes were manifested in the rise of feminized forms of employment with the shift to export-manufacturing-based industrializat...

Many academic commentators have pointed to how the widening and deepening of a neoliberal reform agenda in Southeast Asia has brought about the end of developmental forms of state governance and the emergence of less directly market interventionist states pursuing economic ‘competitiveness’. In this paper, I note how notions of competitiveness are...

There is a now quite a significant body of feminist scholarship in the broad area of International Politics that points to the ongoing marginalization of feminist scholarship from the so-called mainstream (or ‘malestream’) of the discipline (Weber, 1994; Tickner, 1997; Steans, 2003; Youngs, 2004; Zalewski, 2007). Georgina Waylen’s 2006 Review of In...

This paper explores the intersection between gender and migration through an analysis of the advocacy strategies undertaken by Malaysian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and trade unions on behalf of female transnational migrant workers. In particular, the paper looks at the different ways in which local NGOs and trade unions have engaged with...

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In recent years, the production of a gendered and racialised underclass of non-citizen domestic workers has come to play an increasingly important role in meeting the socially reproductive needs of middle class Malaysian households. This article considers the extent to which rights based approaches to migrant worker rights endorsed by both Internat...

This collection of papers focuses on the domestic and international politics of Australia's recent engagement with Asia. The theme of Asian engagement appears to be of particular pertinence to the current study of Australian politics given numerous pronouncements that we are entering an 'Asian century' during which key Asian economies will gain gre...

Focusing on the South-East Asian region and looking specifically at activism around the position of migrant domestic workers in the region, this article seeks to evaluate why migrant activist organisations appear to have had, at best, modest influence on gendering the International Labour Organization's approach to labour rights. The author argues...

In recent years masculinity studies writers, in particular R. W. Connell, have focused on the relationship between globalization and 'hegemonic' forms of masculinity. This paper provides an assessment of this scholarship and argues that whilst Connell and others have usefully identified the gendered nature of globalization, masculinity scholars hav...

This paper seeks to examine how and why gender needs to be brought into the analysis of state developmentalism in Asia. In doing so, the paper focuses on ongoing processes of labour market and industrial relations reform that have accompanied Malaysia's economic development since the early 1970s. Understanding these reforms from a gender perspectiv...

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This article considers the possibilities and limitations that the employment of human rights discourse poses for organizations in Malaysia involved in migrant domestic worker issues. Because domestic employment is such an overwhelmingly feminized occupation, one logical avenue of enquiry is to analyse these organizations' adoption of 'rights talk'...

This article analyzes how the mainstream study of multinational corporations (MNCs) reflects a set of gendered assumptions that construct the firm as a hegemonically masculine political actor. It is suggested that the same masculinist assumptions that are found in these writings on MNCs take shape within firms in the form of a masculinist manageria...

Introduction In this chapter, we seek to examine the gender dimensions of New Labour's international development work as well as to focus on some of the internal and external limitations of these policies. We note that these limitations stem from a number of different factors. First, institutional factors within the Department for International Dev...

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The International Labour Organisation's Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work of 1998 formalised an approach to global labour issues known as the Core Labour Standards (CLS). The CLS have privileged a specific set of labour standards as possessing the kinds of universalistic qualities associated with ideas of 'human rights'; the...

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The female factory worker features widely in feminist or 'gendered' approaches in international political economy (IPE). Such studies draw attention to the way in which the spread of labour intensive, export-oriented manufacturing has depended on the construction of gendered production processes that are based on the exploitation and control of low...

In mainstream International Political Economy (IPE) writings on globalization, the multinational corporation (MNC) is placed at the centre of the emergence of a global market economy. Allied to this view is the normative position that these firms will have a positive, developmental impact on the states that they invest in. This article presents a g...

The article explores the development of systems of human capital evaluation in a number of large UK firms. Human capital is a much used term in business literature, and it is widely recognised that firms need to develop mechanisms to determine the value of their employee base. An extensive human capital literature has developed in which the authors...

Calls for greater levels of protection for workers in the global economy have emerged as a repose to the growth of globally organised networks of production centred around the multinational corporation (MNC). The suggestion is made that, in this context, states, keen to attract foreign investment, are increasingly less able to enforce national labo...