Home • Publications • Projects • La Trobe IR • Journal • Conferences • Lectures & Papers • Profile • Resources • Search • Contact

WTO: The Competitive Dynamic of Globalisation at Work

Joseph A Camilleri is Professor of International Relations at La Trobe University. He has written extensively on international political economy, theories of the state, global governance, international peace and security, human rights, the United Nations, and the Asia-Pacific region.

George Myconos is currently a researcher in the School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University. He completed his PhD thesis - focusing on the globalisation of organised labour - at Monash University in 2004.

Journal: Law in Context

Abstract from Volume 21 (2003)

Tensions associated with globalisation intersect within the World Trade Organization (WTO), the principal coordinating body of the international trading regime. The focus in this article is on three levels of such tension. The authors illuminate conflict as it occurs on North-South, and North-North axes, before turning to a third source of tension, the attempt to reconcile a regulatory framework with a governing ethos premised on deregulation. With reference to the fields of agriculture, steel and intellectual property, as well as to bilateral and regional interstate relations, the authors show how the WTO has come to represent a multidimensional site, an arena of conflict and cooperation, of hegemonic control and resistance, of negotiation and adjudication. They also show how the competition for legitimacy between the WTO and other regional or global formations adds to the fluidity, complexity and uncertainty of the international trading regime, and to the larger dilemmas associated with global governance.