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Benjamin Jerry Cohen (born June 5, 1937 in Ossining, New York) is the Louis G. Lancaster Professor of International Political Economy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At UCSB, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1991, he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on international political economy.
Cohen finished his undergraduate degree in 1959 and his doctorate degree in 1963, both in Economics, at Columbia University.
From 1962 to 1964 Cohen was a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. From 1964 to 1971 he was an assistant professor in the Economics department at Princeton University. Cohen had been a member of the faculty at Tufts University since 1971 and until he joined the faculty at UCSB he was the William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.
His research interests mainly involve issues of international monetary and financial relations, and he has written about matters ranging from exchange rates and monetary integration to financial markets and international debt.
An intellectual history of IPE
In his Introduction to International Political Economy: An Intellectual History, Cohen traces the genesis and development of the rapidly growing field of international political economy. He documents the work of the key pioneers of the discipline: Robert W. Cox, Robert Gilpin, Peter Katzenstein, Robert Keohane, Charles Kindleberger, Stephen Krasner, Joseph Nye, and Susan Strange and he charts the development of IPE from these foundations to the present.
At the heart of the book is a depiction of IPE being divided into American and British camps. The Americans being positivist and attempting to develop intermediate level theories that are supported by some form of quantitative evidence. The work asserts that British IPE is more "interpretivist" and looks for "grand theories" and that they use very different standards of empirical work. Cohen sees benefits in both approaches.
This characteristion of IPE has been debated hotly. One forum for this was the "2008 Warwick RIPE Debate: ‘American’ versus ‘British’ IPE" where Cohen, Mark Blyth, Richard Higgott, and Matthew Watson followed up the recent exchange in RIPE. Higgott and Watson in particular querrying the appropriateness of Cohen's categories.