(Re)politicizing global financial governance: What's 'new' about the 'New' International Financial Architecture?

Abstract

This article is a contribution to the (re)politicization of global financial governance currently underway in the interdisciplinary field of international political economy (IPE). Particular reference is made to the economistic and technicist discourse prevalent in the so-called New International Financial Architecture (NIFA) process. It is argued that a (repoliticized reading of global financial governance is enabled by a conceptualization of governance networks that combines the institutional focus of existing IPE research with a concern with the discursive dynamics of authority relations and that situates governance networks in the power relations, contestation, contradictions and reproduction of global finance. Claims to newness regarding the NIFA process, made by both the architects themselves and left unchallenged by the majority of IPE scholars, are also disputed. The NIFA process is shown to have continued the contested development of an exclusionary transnational neo-liberal network of governance that first began to emerge in the mid-1970s.