Blind spots in IPE: contract law and the structural embedding of transnational capitalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper focuses on the ‘blind spots in IPE’ recently addressed in related Special Issues of Review of International Political Economy and New Political Economy. It identifies a blind spot of law in IPE, tracing the problem to a blind spot in the discipline of international relations (IR) generated by tendencies in dominant theories to consider international law to be super-structural, epiphenomenal, and not worthy of political analysis, and to associations of international law with idealism. The analysis notes an inverse blind spot in international law (IL), wherein legal scholars tend to regard IL as autonomous of politics and the political economy of ‘who gets what, when, how’. These blind spots contribute to the neglect of how legal forms function to mystify the political economy of IL, thereby advancing transnational capitalism and inequality. The empirical focus is on transnational contract law, dispute settlement, and value and production chain contracting. These laws function as Capital’s law and central pillars of the transnational politico-legal order by reaching deep inside states to restructure domestic spheres according to new constitutionalism and the demands of transnational capital. Drawing on critical political economy, the paper develops a historical materialist analysis to denaturalize and demystify Capital’s law. This is a necessary move for scholars interested in the progressive and emancipatory potential of IL.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".