Writing Global Trade Governance operationalises a key post-structuralist methodology in order to expand understanding on the institution at the heart of the global political economy. Despite the WTO’s centrality and the growing popularity of methods utilizing discourse theory, no other text has yet demonstrated how these two fields of learning can be productively combined. The book seeks to move beyond existing literatures that assume the WTO to be a structure, institution or normative framework, in order to enquire into the discursive processes of identity formation that make the WTO both possible and contested. The book criticises conventional approaches that treat critical civil society as distinct to the WTO, arguing instead that it is only through including such social practices within the field of relations making the WTO that we can properly understand what makes the WTO work. The book presents an empirical analysis of the discursive character of the present-day WTO (including its formation and operation) and then moves on to evaluate how it is subject to change within a broader social context. The final stage of the book seeks to discuss the impact of the findings on future research, both on the WTO and other institutions. This work is a significant intervention in the literature on the World Trade Organization and the politics of global trade and social movements, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of global governance, discourse theory and international organizations.
Author(s): Michael Strange
Series: Interventions
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge | Taylor & Francis Group
Year: 2014
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 224
Tags: World Trade Organization; International Cooperation; International Organizations
Cover
Writing Global Trade Governance
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
1 | Introduction: Embedding the World Trade Organization
The WTO as the ‘rule of law’ or as ‘power politics’
The problem of defining agency in the WTO
Problematizing the WTO as Member-led
The social construction of the Member state identity
The WTO as a sedimented discursive formation
A new research strategy: the WTO in this book
What is the ‘WTO’?
2 | Contesting global trade governance: A genealogy of the WTO
Introduction
Genealogy
Multiple articulations of global trade governance
National security
Peaceful cooperation
Weapon of the free world
Development
Multilateralism
Radically rearticulating global trade governance
Articulating the need for an organization
Emergence of new identities
Conclusion
3 | The WTO as an uncertain political project
Introduction
The WTO as formal rules and informal norms
An uncertain identity
Conclusion
4 | The emergence of new actors in the WTO: The NGO identity
Introduction
The question of the ‘actor’: a problematization of the primacy of the Member state identity
Formalization of NGOs in the WTO
Beyond the formal NGO identity
Contesting NGOs in the WTO
Politicization of global trade governance
Conclusion
5 | The formation of new actors contesting the WTO: The example of anti-GATS campaigning
Introduction
Case study
Emergence of a collective identity
A very brief introduction to the GATS
Articulating the critique of GATS
The sedimentation of an anti-GATS equivalential chain
Unequal mobilization
Campaigning as multi-pronged
The end of political mobilization critical of the GATS?
Conclusion: the elasticity of equivalential chains
6 | Conclusion: The discursivity of global trade governance
Introduction
Summary
So what if the WTO is understood discursively?
The WTO reconsidered
Bibliography
Index
