Description
The New International Economic Order (NIEO) played a formative role in shaping International Political Economy (IPE), not just as a redistributive project of the Global South, but as a catalyst for rethinking the governance of multinational corporations. Sparked by mounting evidence of corporate misconduct – from transfer pricing abuses to political interference – the NIEO agenda helped institutionalize a global conversation about the structural power of firms and the limits of national regulation. I show how this moment gave rise to a rich and until recently largely forgotten, strand of early IPE scholarship focused on “corporate escape”: i.e. the strategic evasion of accountability by multinational enterprises.
Rather than viewing the NIEO as a utopian initiative, I trace how its associated technocratic ambitions – especially through the UN Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) and the broader Code of Conduct movement – shaped the early contours of IPE as a discipline. This includes the development of regulatory proposals, accounting standards, and conceptual tools that foregrounded the political agency of firms. I also recover the contributions of Northern economic nationalists and public intellectuals, whose work paralleled and informed NIEO debates, challenging bipolar core-periphery models. By reconstructing this intellectual and institutional history, I argue that the NIEO’s legacy offers a critical vantage point for understanding contemporary struggles over corporate power. It invites us to revisit foundational questions in IPE about sovereignty, transparency, and the epistemic conditions of economic governance, with a renewed interdisciplinary lens.
