Theory. She recently co-edited a special issue on Social Reproduction (Review of International Political Economy, 2010, 17: 5) and has a monograph forth- coming in the Palgrave Studies in International Relations Series on ‘The Myth of Global Civil Society’. Finding space in critical IPE: a scalar-relational approach Huw Macartney and Stuart Shields Politics School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. E-mails: huw.macartney@manchester.ac.uk; stuart.shields@manchester.ac.uk Journal of International Relations and Development (2011) 14, 375–383. doi:10.1057/jird.2011.9 Our aim in this essay is to explore how critical international political economy (IPE) is spatially impaired, and how a scalar-relational approach offers a potential solution. By this, we mean that despite the plethora of spatial terms (national, international, global, transnational) applied as levels of analysis, the counter-hegemonic aspects of critical IPE are hamstrung by an inability to account for the production of space and the relations between particular scales. Such concerns obviously matter given the spatial turn across many social sciences, and the suggestions that an ‘understanding of space and the spatiality of social and political relations would lead to more coherent and accurate analyses of political phenomena’ (Bates and Smith 2008: 202). In essence, we agree. However, what we contend is absent in this formulation of the importance of space is the relationship between different spaces, and their permanent contestation through politico-economic restructuring. Put bluntly, space does not need adding: it is already there as one of capitalism’s constitutive elements. There are three main aspects: first, the ‘economy’, with scales from the global to the workplace; second, the state, the national scale; and third, the socio-cultural scale, from the home to the locality. IPE considers these separately, if at all. Our argument is that the IPE is produced by the internal relations of these spaces. It is in the scalar relations across spaces, from the global to the workplace to the home, where fundamental forms of class, gender and racial power are configured. To understand this relation, an appreciation of scale as the ‘political economic means of bounding and adjudicating rules and relations of capitalist competition and cooperation of sameness and difference’ across different Huw Macartney and Stuart Shields Finding space in critical IPE 375