Review of International Political Economy 10:4 November 2003: 661–671 Review of International Political Economy ISSN 0969-2290 print/ISSN 1466-4526 online © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk DOI: 10.1080/09692290310001601920 Babylon and on? Globalization and international political economy 1 Ben Rosamond University of Warwick ABSTRACT Debates about globalization are now central to the enterprise of IPE. The substantive research agenda of globalization studies has yielded a number of strategies to qualify or refute commonplace claims about globalization found in much policy discourse. Yet the achievements of such scholarship have not induced discernible shifts in the deployment of ‘globalization’ as a key shaper of the realities of contemporary political economy. At an ana- lytical level globalization studies in IPE suffer from a number of ambiguities that relate to definition, measurement and the nature of 'globalization' as a variable in explanation. Orthodox (rationalist) reasoning might seek to either abandon or ‘normalize’ the concept of ‘globalization’. In contrast, this article calls for the ‘ideational’ matter of globalization to be taken more seriously and for studies of globalization discourse to occupy a more central position in the project of IPE. KEYWORDS Globalization; IPE; Discourse. INTRODUCTION Debates about globalization have been central to the enterprise of Inter- national Political Economy (IPE) over the past decade. We might even choose to define IPE as the study of globalization, not least because many of the claims about the distinctiveness of IPE as a field of enquiry are bound up with what are commonly understood to be the key processes and effects of globalization. These include the changing nature of relations between states and markets, the growing power of non-state forces, the changing nature of economic governance, the reorganization of authority and power relations in world politics, the rise of global multilateral institutions and the de-territorialization of political economies.