An issue much discussed among international relations scholars today is that of the political economy of security. Stiles and Akaha (1991) note that this issue was long ignored in spite of the primacy of security in foreign policies of contemporary nations. The authors believe that the failure to address these issues is rooted in the general dissatisfaction of many students of international relations during the 1960s as they focused almost exclusively on state-actors and their presumed preoccupation with national security. Scholars have since that time paid more attention to the growing phenomenon of international interdependence, and this blurred the distinction between domestic and foreign policy and placing non-security issues on the national and international political agendas alike. Because the state-centric paradigm was inadequate to this task, there was a resulting deemphasis on security affairs. Stiles and Akaha believe this is wrong and call for the appreciation of insights from economics and political science: "Especially in the context of both the ending of the Cold War and questions about how to spend the still hypothetical peace dividend of savings in defense spending, and the Iraqi oil grab of mid-1990, one is hard-pressed to separate economics and security" (p. 332).
This debate has actually been given added impetus by the apparent end of the Cold War and the accompanying disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc. Political economists today have to address the issue of security directly because every nation is now in a state of flux concerning how much security is really needed in the world as presently constructed. President Bush calls for a New World Order that would presumably be free of much of the tension of the old order, but this order has not yet been instituted. In the meantime, what do we do to protect ourselves, and from what threat do we think we are protecting ourselves? How much s...