The Extensive (But Fragile) Authority of the WTO Appellate Body

The authority of an international court (IC) is not necessarily evolutionary and its development unidirectional. This article addresses the authority of the Appellate Body (AB) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and shows how it rapidly and almost immediately became extensive, but has since exhibited signs of becoming more fragile. The article applies a typology of IC authority developed by Alter, Helfer and Madsen (2014) and explains the transformation from narrow authority (a dispute resolution venue under the GATT based on political negotiations) to extensive authority (a judicialized WTO dispute settlement system with a sophisticated case law) and presents empirical indicators of the rise of the AB’s authority. Such rapid development of extensive authority is arguably a unique case in international politics at the multilateral level. That authority nonetheless remains fragile, and shows signs that it could decline significantly for reasons we explain

L'action directe en correctionnelle: la Ligue d'action du bâtiment et l'affaire de Versoix (1931)

La Ligue d’Action du Bâtiment (L.A.B.), organe de combat anarcho-syndicaliste, a pratiqué l’action directe de façon systématisée sur les chantiers genevois. Ses actions coup-de-poing – bagarres, destruction, sabotage – lui ont valu de nombreux passages devant le tribunal correctionnel dans la première moitié des années trente, soulignant la tension constante entre légitimité d’une lutte et illégalité des moyens employé

The democratizing effects of multilateral organizations: a cautionary note on the WTO

The field of international relations has been obsessed with democracy and democratization and its effects on international cooperation for a long time. More recently, research has turned its focus on how international organizations enhance democracy. This article contributes to this debate and applies a prominent liberal framework to study the ‘outside-in' effects of the World Trade Organization. The article offers a critical reading of democratization through IO membership. It provides for an assessment of the dominant framework put forward by Keohane et al. (2009). In doing so, it develops a set of empirical strategies to test conjectured causal mechanisms with respect to the WTO, and illustrates the potential application by drawing on selected empirical evidence from trade politics. Finally, it proposes a number of analytical revisions to the liberal framework and outlines avenues for future researc

The World Trade Organization at work: Performance in a member-driven milieu

This article discusses performance in the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Applying the framework by Gutner and Thompson and inspired by principal-agent theory, it is argued that existing studies have underspecified the institutional milieu that affects performance. The WTO represents a member-driven organization where Members are part of the international organization (IO) (e.g., through rule-making) and at the same time act outside the IO (e.g., through implementation). Thus, a narrow reading of the IO (focusing on the civil servants and the Director-General and his staff) will not suffice to understand IO performance in the WTO context. Selected evidence is presented to illustrate aspects of the WTO's inner-working and the institutional milieu of performance. In addition, the article discusses a number of performance parameters, including the relationship between Secretariat autonomy and performance, the role of information, and the mechanisms of performance aggregation. The article ends by cautioning against quick fixes to the system to improve performanc

Reflections on Geopolitics

The notion of geopolitics is widely used in public debates these days. This paper focuses on how the concept has evolved over time in the study of international economic cooperation focusing in particular on trade and investment policies. In light of international relations and international political economy perspectives, the paper discusses the origins of the concepts found in the early 20th century. It then describes how it was marginalized by mainstream theories during the Cold War period, albeit it was implicitly taken up by theorists in the tradition of offensive realism. The paper then maps the liberal turn of the 1990s in political economy and how power politics were further relegated to the background with increasing market integration. It was not until the 2000s when power politics made a slow return. Both academia and politics have been witnessing a surprising renaissance of geopolitics in the past 10 years. The paper maps out the contours of this new variant of geopolitics, a mix of superpower rivalry and economic nationalism, and offers some reflections regarding the danger of deterministic scenarios and ways to temper geopolitics going forward