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This panel brings together papers examining the key mechanisms shaping contemporary inter-capitalist and interstate competition and the ongoing fractures in the international order. In a world marked by war in Europe, genocidal campaigns in the Middle East, accelerating decoupling between the US and China, and repeated disruptions to global energy and food supplies, it revisits the classic debate on structural power in International Political Economy from a critical perspective.
Structural power is usually understood as the capacity of states or other actors to influence outcomes within existing institutional arrangements. We aim to raise a debate focusing instead on the ways structural power shapes international governance and the organization of the global economy. Therefore, the discussion places structural power at the center of the analysis while rethinking its conventional conceptualization through an ontological perspective also informed by theoretical contributions from the Global South. including dependency approaches, as well as by the empirical reality of an increasingly multipolar world.
By bringing these perspectives together, the panel seeks to advance substantive and methodological debates in International Political Economy, revolving around core questions such as: how do changing configurations of structural power help explain the current upheavals in international governance? What do they tell us about its capacity to manage or contain conflict? How do they contribute to shape and maintain sanctions regimes, supply chain reconfiguration, new financial and technological blocs, etc.? Contributions should focus primarily on the relations between economic dynamics and political power, also in comparative perspective, and on how they affect the organization - and the profound crisis - of international governance, at a time when multilateral institutions appear increasingly paralyzed in the face of war, economic fragmentation, and competing visions of world order.