Remarks on Andrew Lang's World Trade Law After Neo-Liberalism

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The impending demise of the WTO Appellate Body: from centrepiece to historical relic?

The current crisis engulfing the multilateral trading system has crystalized in the dispute over the (re-)appointment of the members of the World Trade Organization\u27s Appellate Body. While the legislative arm of the organization has never lived up to its potential, its dispute settlement arm with the Appellate Body at its apex was seen as a lodestar for other international courts and tribunals. The United States has taken issue not only with individual decisions of the Appellate Body (as well as individual Appellate Body members), but with the institution as such. The article recounts the important institutional redesign that has led to the Appellate Body becoming the World Trade Organization\u27s institutional centerpiece . These very same developments are now destined to lead to the Appellate Body\u27s downfall with potential reverberations for the entire World Trade Organization\u27s dispute settlement process. Moreover, it threatens the institution as a whole, unless some last minute compromise can be found between various competing visions of global economic governance

Uncertainty, speculation, subjectivity: the expanding judicial role in sovereign debt workouts

This chapter situates a discussion of the NML decision against Argentina within a wider political economy context to better understand the expanding judicial role in sovereign debt workouts. The observed surge in debt demand, growing debt to Gross Domestic Product ratios in debt states increasingly reliant on refinancing their budgetary deficits and a fragmenting consensus that sustained the informal debt workout process so far indicate that sovereign debt speculators that drive demand are making investment decisions in conditions of uncertainty. This paper delineates the political economy contexts in which these speculators evolved as legal subjects. In modern debt markets, the common law courts have become instrumental in entrenching the subjectivity of the debt speculator. This role is an overlooked factor that explains their expansive influence on sovereign debt workouts

Redeeming the universal: postcolonialism and the inner life of Eurocentrism

his article investigates the limits of postcolonial International Relations’ anti- Eurocentrism through an interrogation of its ambivalent relation with the category of ‘the universal.’ It argues that a decisive defeat of Eurocentrism, within and beyond International Relations, requires the formulation of a non-ethnocentric international social theory which postcolonial approaches, à la poststructuralism, reject on the grounds that it involves the idea of the universal equated with socio-cultural homogeneity. Yet, postcolonial approaches also theorize colonial modernity through deploying forms of methodological internationalism that broach the universal. Through a critical engagement with the wider field of postcolonial theory, and an anatomy of the notion of the universal in Hegel and Trotsky, this article argues that homogeneity is not an intrinsic quality of the concept of the universal, but a result of its specifically internalist mode of construction. Supplanting Eurocentrism therefore requires an explicit theoretical incorporation of the universal. But one which is fundamentally rethought away from being an immanent self-transcendence of the particular, and re- comprehended as a radical amenability to, and constitutiveness of, alterity. This is, the article argues, a defining feature of Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development