Bridging Political Economy and Phenomenology: Ideology, Intentionality, and Material Structures in International Relations

Abstract

International Relations (IR) continues to face a persistent analytical divide between material explanations of global politics and interpretive accounts of meaning, identity and agency. This article develops a conceptual bridge between political economy and phenomenology by asking how material structures become politically effective through socially organized meanings, and how actors experience political objects such as threat, security, development, legitimacy and responsibility. Using conceptual synthesis and critical theoretical reconstruction, the article rereads historical materialism, ideology and Brentano's intentionality as connected levels of analysis. The analysis shows that material structures do not operate as mechanical determinants. They become practically effective when institutions, expert systems and hegemonic vocabularies translate them into categories such as risk, stability and competitiveness. Ideology is therefore treated not only as misrepresentation but also as lived mediation: a patterned organization of attention, valuation and practical judgment. Brentano's concept of intentionality clarifies how political objects appear to actors as threats, obligations, opportunities or limits. The proposed framework links four moments: material structure, ideological mediation, intentional formation and IR practice. This framework helps explain the reproduction of global hierarchies, the durability of common sense in governance and the conditions under which counter-hegemonic alternatives become thinkable. Methodologically, the article recommends historical-institutional analysis, critical political economy mapping, discourse/category analysis, practice-oriented inquiry and process tracing across levels. It concludes that IR research can explain international politics more adequately when material power and lived sense-making are kept in the same analytical field. The contribution is a critical-phenomenological political economy that can guide theoretical debate and future empirical research on hegemony, crisis governance and institutional transformation