In the 1990s, the focus of the field of International Political Economy (IPE) has come to be centred on the phenomenon of ‘economic globalisation’. It is a phenomenon that seems to both describe and explain many of the momentous changes in the global political economy of the late twentieth century. Although economic globalisation is now at the centre of the field's concerns, its precise meaning and significance remain hotly contested among International Political Economy scholars. This is hardly surprising. In this latest phase of its development, International Political Economy has begun to attract scholars from a wider diversity of disciplinary backgrounds than ever before. No longer is the field restricted to a dialogue between political scientists and economists. Geographers, sociologists, anthropologists and historians have also come to assume a central place within the field's debates. The task of arriving at a common intellectual approach to the study of economic globalisation for scholars from such a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds is obviously a daunting one.

As the definitional and conceptual debates surrounding the phrase ‘economic globalisation’ have heated up, one response has been to advocate the abandonment of the phrase altogether on the grounds that it is contributing more to confusion than to understanding. Although under contributing more to confusion than to understanding. Although understandable, this response is likely to be a futile one; ‘economic globalisation’ is a phrase that will not quickly disappear from academic and policy debates.