How can sociology contribute to the new global political economy? lessons from the rise and future demise of world-systems analysis

Abstract In this article, I describe calls for a new global political economy (GPE) originating outside sociology, and identify strategies by which sociologists can answer these calls. These strategies take as their point of departure the successes and failures of sociology’s intellectual offspring closest to the new GPE: world-systems analysis (WSA). I first engage in a close reading of David Lake’s (2009) seminal statement on open economy politics (OEP), which describes the consolidation of a “bottom-up” approach to economic globalization rooted in the struggles of international political economy (IPE) to explain the changing landscape of the 1970s. I then describe a counter-rebellion to OEP initiated by Thomas Oatley (2011) and Benjamin Cohen (2017), which argues forcefully that OEP fails to consider the “top-down” global and systemic causes of the outcomes it seeks to explain. This new GPE is committed to theoretically coherent top-down explanations and methodological rigor, but varies in its fundamental epistemological and methodological assumptions. The emergence of the new GPE coincides in time with the decline of WSA in sociology, despite the centrality of the “global” and “systemic” to WSA. Moreover, sociology has scarcely contributed to the new GPE despite the deeply sociological intuitions in much of the new GPE. Thus, I analyze the rise and future demise of WSA to identify strategies sociologists can deploy to contribute effectively to the new GPE in our own discipline and beyond.