Rorden Wilkinson

Macquarie University

Bringing together leading experts in trade law and policy, this volume investigates the coherence between the European Union's trade policy and its non-trade objectives. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, it highlights previously unaddressed dimensions of EU policy objectives and outcomes. With a range of illustrative case studies, the contrib...

2021 marked the twentieth anniversary of China entering the WTO. Those first two decades have been far from smooth with multiple trade tensions arising between China and other members, both within the WTO and beyond. This article uses the twenty-year milestone as an opportunity to assess China’s role within the global trade system and the impact it...

Este artículo trata de los muy numerosos individuos que hacen posible la gobernanza global. Indaga el papel de intermediarios ocultos, por lo general alejados de la mirada académica: profesionales, equipos de servicio y otros que actúan entre bastidores. No están en la cima de las organizaciones públicas y privadas (donde imperan “gobernantes [es d...

This article focuses on the vast number of people who make global governance happen. It probes the role of the unknown people in the “middle” who are largely absent from scholarly gaze: professionals, service teams, and others who act behind the scenes. They are not at the top of public and private organizations (“global governors” in the literatur...

In this article we explore what a programme of ‘reglobalization’ could look like for the governance of global trade. Our focus is on the centrepiece of the current commercial order, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Our aim is to illustrate the potential value of a reformulated WTO not just for commercial relations globally but also for other are...

Ever wondered what ‘teaching outside the box’ looks like? Disrupting Traditional Pedagogy: Active Learning in Practice answers this question by sharing real stories of innovation in active learning from a variety of contexts and disciplines. The central premise of active learning is that people learn best when they are actively involved in construc...

The purpose of this article is to establish the value of looking at global governance from the point of view of those who are governed, thereby making them more visible in a field in which they have often had too little profile. This is a necessary addition to an evolving global governance scholarship that seeks to highlight greater sensitivity to...

The conclusion of the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Buenos Aires ministerial conference (10–13 December 2017) was immediately celebrated and derided in equal measure. For its supporters, Buenos Aires opened the way toward negotiations in e‐commerce, investment facilitation for development, and measures designed to help micro, small and medium si...

Since the WTO’s creation its relationship with civil society has changed significantly. In this article, we use an original dataset to: (1) plot the changes that have taken place in civil society group representation at the WTO Public Forum; and (2) assess the significance of these changes for understandings of public interactions with the WTO. We...

This paper peers backwards into the history of the multilateral trading system and its development over the past half century as a means of considering what may lie beyond the horizon for the future of global trade governance. Its purpose is to underscore the necessity and urgency for root-and-branch reform of the multilateral trading system. It ac...

This article reflects on the role crises play in enabling existing systems of global economic governance to evolve and endure while also preserving underlying power dynamics. The article uses as its case-study global trade governance. Its aim is to explore the impact of the negotiating crises that beset the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Doha rou...

Civil society organizations are often seen as playing a crucial role in helping to mitigate the exclusion of weaker states, giving voice to marginalized communities, and raising environmental and developmental concerns within the trade system. The politicization and demystification of the global trade agenda by civil society also opens up space for...

This concluding article argues that while the actions of emerging powers have left an indelible mark on the way multilateral trade is governed, they have not been able to disrupt to any significant degree the deeper structures of power that underpin the World Trade Organization (WTO). While emerging powers have proven to be important players in the...

Why, despite well-established and well-publicized intergovernmental processes that date back to the early 1970s, have we been unable to put in place effective mechanisms to combat climate change? Why, despite the existence of extensive global human rights machinery, do we live in a world where mass kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder continue to...

Introduction: Drivers and Change in Global Governance - Volume 29 Issue 4 - Thomas G. Weiss, Rorden Wilkinson

This review offers a critical reading of the November 2014 India–U.S. trade deal that unblocked an impasse in the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha round and considers what it means for the way we govern global trade. It argues that the agreement, rather than being a ‘victory’ for the developing world or a cause for celebration, may simply rein...

Since the People’s Republic of China (PRC) embarked upon a program of reform beginning in 1978, China’s “rise” has generated considerable debate. Outside of the country, much of the debate has concentrated on whether China will be a “system-challenging” (that is, a “revisionist”) power, or one that is “status quo”-preserving, despite the well noted...

The zombie genre is quickly becoming a feature of International Relations (IR) classrooms and pedagogical toolkits as scholars enthusiastically embrace the undead as a vehicle for teaching the discipline. This article offers a cautionary note on a generally positive move to embrace the use of zombieism in IR. It shows how an uncritical use of a zom...

International relations teeters on the edge of an abyss of irrelevance. As an academic pursuit, it has become disparate and fragmented. Those of us in the discipline have ceased to pursue greater clarity in the way that we understand the world around us. Moreover, we have failed as agents of change; that is, as purveyors of opinion and proposals ab...

The conclusion of the World Trade Organization’s (wto) ninth ministerial meeting – held in Bali 3–7 December 2013 – is at one and the same time momentous, marginal and business-as-usual. It is momentous because it marks the first multilateral agreement reached in the wto since the organisation began operations on 1 January 1995; it is marginal beca...

The rise of China has elicited a voluminous response from scholars, business groups, journalists and beyond. Within this literature, a ‘China Threat Theory’ has emerged which portrays China as a destabilizing force within global politics and economics. Though originating in Realist accounts, this China Threat Theory has spread across to other appro...

Global governance remains notoriously slippery. While the term arose to describe change in the late twentieth century, its association with that specific moment has frozen it in time and deprived it of analytical utility. It has become an alternative moniker for international organizations, a descriptor for an increasingly crowded world stage, a ca...

Rorden Wilkinson explores the factors behind the collapse of World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerials – as in Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003 – and asks why such events have not significantly disrupted the development of the multilateral trading system.

This article examines the forms of economic restructuring recently undertaken by Mauritius and Seychelles in response to recent changes in the global economy, which have a fundamental impact upon their socio-economic landscape. We argue that both Mauritius and Seychelles have recently embarked upon programmes that do not actually attenuate their ex...

This paper examines the generation and uses of expert knowledge around trade matters and the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda (DDA) in particular. It examines the input of such experts into the negotiation process, particularly through what is emerging as the dominant method of trade analysis – computable general and partial equilibrium modelling. The...

This paper evaluates the major options for reformulating the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Our purpose is to add weight and direction to emerging thinking on MDG reformulation in a way that: (i) reaffirms the importance of global efforts to reduce extreme poverty; (ii) overcomes the problems endemic in the existing MDGs; (iii) accelerates th...

The World Trade Organization's (WTO) Doha round is in trouble; but so is the way we talk about the institution and the negotiations. Economists, international lawyers, political scientists, practitioners and pundits alike have locked themselves into a deeply constraining and quite unhelpful way of talking and thinking about the WTO that has little...

This article explores the current turn within the World Trade Organisation and broader trade system away from multilateralism towards negotiating plurilateral agreements. Plurilateralism is being pushed in many quarters as a potential means of overcoming the impasse that has emerged within the Doha Development Agenda. Using insights from history, t...

The 'rise' of China stands as one of the most significant developments in global politics in the post-cold war era. Yet, China's rise has not been uniformly welcomed. For some, it has generated fears that the PRC's growing global prominence will inevitably be malignant; for others the rise of China has been largely 'system-preserving' in character....

Two distinct literatures have emerged on the World Trade Organization's Doha Development Agenda (DDA) and its likely benefits for developing countries. One is built on the use of computable general and partial equilibrium simulations, while another explores the political economy of the negotiation process to explore the opportunities a concluded ro...

Introduction Much time and effort has been dedicated to the issue of WTO reform. Calls for the institution’s reform fill the pages of broadsheet newspapers, weekly periodicals, Internet forums, non-governmental organisation (NGO) bulletins and myriad other outlets in the run-up to, during and following a WTO Ministerial Meeting; and developing new...

This article offers an alternative account of the performance of the World Trade Organization (WTO) - an institution whose performance is usually assessed in terms of its capacity to function as a forum for the exchange of mutually beneficial trade concessions, its ability to act as an arena in which trade rules can be negotiated and its capacity t...

This article draws on Edward Said's notion of ‘imaginary geographies’ to explore how representations of small island states enabled particular colonial interventions to take place in the Indian Ocean region and to show how these representations are currently being reworked to support development strategies. It examines how particular colonial imagi...

This paper sets out to examine the likely benefits accruing to developing countries from the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) as it currently stands. In pursuit of this aim, the paper draws from the insights of both the economic and the political economy literatures in pursuit of a more fulsome account of the likely results of the DDA for poor countri...

This article offers an account and analysis of the World Trade Organization's (WTO) 7th Ministerial Conference – a meeting that, although ‘successfully’ concluded, failed to address a series of key issues in the increasingly moribund Doha Round of trade negotiations. We begin with an account of the meeting that offers an insight into the ‘colour’ o...

Warnings that a breakdown in multilateral trade liberalization would bring about an upsurge in protectionist sentiment, the possible collapse of the multilateral trading system and, in the most doomsday of scenarios, the fragmentation of the global economy have been an intrinsic part of trade negotiations since the General Agreement on Tariffs and...

NAMA liberalisation alone will not be sufficient to make the Doha Round a pro-development Round. It is important to enlarge the vision to include, for example, services and certain aspects of intellectual property rights. Further the 'policy space' notion often mentioned when discussing trade-development relations should not be defined as limited t...

In his account of the impact of family relations on personal development popular psychologist Oliver James offers a scenario of inter-family relations that provides a useful metaphor which helps us think about the kinds of trade politics, the diplomatic styles and behavioural patterns, and system of governance that the World Trade Organization (WTO...

The World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) consistent rejection of proposals for the inclusion of a social clause into its existing rules and regulations has prompted the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to examine alternative ways in which global consensus on the regulation of labour standards can be developed. In this paper we map the failure of...

This article offers an analysis of the collapse of the WTO talks in Cancun in September 2003. It argues that the collapse of the talks should not be regarded as a victory for the developing world, as many have suggested. Rather, the collapse should be seen as the inevitable result of deep‐seated tensions within the wto 's institutional framework, b...

The growth and development of advanced communications networks, most outstandingly the Internet, has facilitated the creation of an expanding international electronic marketplace within which electronic commerce takes place with increasing frequency. The relative newness of this electronic forum has ensured that, until recently, e-commerce has been...

Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published in Convergence: The International Journal Of Research Into New Media Technologies, published by and copyright Sage. Drawing on perspectives from telecommunications policy and neo-Gramscian understandings of international political economy this...

This new feature seeks to provide regular reports on the current activities and thinking of key agents of contemporary global governance. The reports will thus range over major global organisations, major civil society actors and major corporate institutions. Our thinking in initiating this feature is that, whilst the need to understand the role of...

As well as consolidating and enhancing the process of trade liberalisation, the completion of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations establishing the World Trade Organisation (WTO) formalised the expansion of multilateral trade regulation into areas of commercial activity previously deemed to be trade-related. This expansion, however,...

Drawing on perspectives from telecommunications policy and neo-Gramscian understandings of international political economy, this paper offers an explanation and analysis of the shifting patterns of regulation which have been evident in the telecommunications sector in recent years. It aims to illustrate explain and explore the implications of the m...

The failure of the Seattle Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to launch a much hyped Millennium Round of trade negotiations has attracted a good deal of journalistic and scholarly comment. Beyond this, some debate exist as to whether the WTO also ought to deal with pushing the trade agenda forward as well as addressing a rang...

No Abstracts Available

Paper presented to the International Research Foundation for Development, World Forum on the Information Society, Geneva, Switzerland, 8-10th December 2003.

Restricted Item. Print thesis available in the University of Auckland Library or may be available through Inter-Library Loan. Restricted Item. Print thesis available in the University of Auckland Library or may be available through Inter-Library Loan. Recently the regulation of international trade has undergone a significant change. The GATT, previ...