A set of ethical issues—tensions between democratization and globalization, about some ways in which the global inequalities have increased, and about gross failures of contemporary international cooperation—provide reason to consider our understanding of global governance and the political forces organized to support or transform it. Many scholars agree on the existence of a global polity characterized by the dominance of neo‐liberalism, the growing network of both public and private regimes that extend across the world's largest regions, the system of global intergovernmental organizations, and transnational organizations both carrying out some of the traditional service functions of global public agencies and working to create regimes and new systems of international integration. Scholars who emphasize the historically contingent social construction of human institutions and who focus on the transformative potential of transnational social movements have provided the greatest insight into what can be done to confront the ethical issues raised by contemporary global governance. Almost all analysts agree that the current great powers cannot be relied upon to facilitate progressive change, although that is only one reason why global governance is likely to remain inefficient and incapable of shifting resources from the world's rich to the poor, even though it may continue to play a role in promoting liberal democracy and the empowering of women.

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International political economy (IPE) originated in the early 1970s. For almost 20 years it has been dominated by separate, largely non-communicating schools, one centred on scholarly institutions in Britain, the other associated with the US journal, International Organization (IO). In terms of the evolving norms of both economics and political science, both schools are surprisingly heterodox. Rather than developing strong systematic data collections and systematic theory, the IO school has been characterised by a shifting set of conceptual and metatheoretical debates. The British school, which has tended to take a deliberately critical position, has been characterised by an ever-widening set of concerns topical concerns fuelled by a desire to include more and more voices in the study of IPE. These outcomes are explicable only by tracing the specific historical developments of the two schools.Today's field of international political economy (IPE) can be traced back to 1971 when Susan Strange, then at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, founded the International Political Economy Group (IPEG). In its early days, this company of scholars, journalists and policy-makers focused on issues such as how to resuscitate the fixed exchange-rate system and on the thesis of another early IPEG convener, Fred Hirsch, that comfortable middle-class people in the industrialised world would come to doubt the utility of further economic growth (Hirsch 1976).These were not to be the subjects that would lead to the institutionalisation of IPE by attracting funders, shifting the research agendas

514 International Organization their work, publishing it in peace studies and development quarterlies, which were a bit more receptive than the general international relations journals, and in the growing number of journals of women's studies. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s peace researchers and peace educators completed analyses on gender and war that had significant political impact on the increasingly influential women's peace movements and on the many women organizing within the armed forces, foreign service, and leading political parties around the world. 4 The study of women in development burgeoned as well. 5 Yet, neither strand of politically significant scholarship had visible impact on mainstream scholarship in international relations until 1988 when the London School of Economics journal, Millennium, published a special issue, "Women and International Relations." 6 That collection marked a turning point. Articles from the special issue and a follow-up discussion reappeared in 1991 as a book edited by Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland. 7 The British and North American International Studies Associations soon established gender studies research sections. The Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California and the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women held conferences that brought together feminists and more traditional international relations scholars and resulted in a volume edited by V. Spike Peterson. 8 Jean Elshtain and Shelia Tobias published a new compilation of feminist scholarship on war and peace. 9 The board of the British International Studies Association's prestigious Cambridge University Press series on international relations invited Elshtain to join them, and they contracted for Christine Sylvester's Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era. 10 The publication of Sylvester's book in 1994, on the heels of J. Ann Tickner's 1992 work, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, signaled the new centrality of gender in international relations theory. Pioneering empirical studies of women in the lower ranks of the U.S. military and the upper ranks of all U.S. foreign policymakers had already appeared. 11 These were joined by a transnationally focused collection of empirical studies, Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World, edited by Mary Ann Tetreault. 12 Cynthia Enloe provided a lively introductory text with her Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations