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| 1 |
ID:
120718
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Abstract Not only is the participation of developing countries in international trade negotiations growing, so is their influence over the global trade agenda. This article highlights the increasing activism and impact of African states through a detailed study of the current Economic Partnership Agreement (EPAs) negotiations with the European Union (EU). In examining African resistance to EPAs, the article develops a constructivist approach to North-South trade negotiations that pays close attention to the role of development discourses. We argue that the growing willingness of African states to challenge the EU to deliver on its development promises during the decade-long EPA process was crucial to informing their sustained opposition to the EU's goal of completing a comprehensive set of sub-regional economic agreements. We document African resistance to EU trade diplomacy in the EPAs, exploring how these otherwise weak countries were able to pursue normative-based negotiation strategies by recourse to the EU's promise of a 'development partnership.'
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| 2 |
ID:
053671
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| 3 |
ID:
081298
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| Publication |
2008.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Small states have come to play an increasingly active part in multilateral trade negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO) such that small state activism has been a major contributory factor in the continuing delay in concluding the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) negotiations. This suggests that small states are no longer bit players and are instead key actors in the WTO. Through the formation of a range of alliances, small developing states have become central to the process and form of multilateral trade negotiations. In this article we highlight this increasing activism of small states through a study of the DDA cotton negotiations. We focus in particular on the activism and influence of four small developing African states; Burkina Faso, Benin, Chad and Mali in the negotiations. In order to explore whether size really 'matters' in the WTO system, our study demonstrates that while size has some relevance-since it creates unequal deliberative capacities-the major obstacle to effective influence is the persistence of protectionist policies in the cotton sector and the inability of the WTO to enforce its own liberal trade rules and obligations
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| 4 |
ID:
100321
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article supports growing calls to 'take small states seriously' in the international political economy but questions prevailing interpretations that 'smallness' entails inherent qualities that create unique constraints on, and opportunities for, small states. Instead, we argue that discourses surrounding the 'inherent vulnerability' of small states, especially developing and less-developed states, may produce the very outcomes that are attributed to state size itself. By presenting small states as a problem to be solved, vulnerability discourses divert attention away from the existence of unequal power structures that, far from being the natural result of smallness, are in fact contingent and politically contested. The article then explores these themes empirically through discussion of small developing and less-developed states in the Commonwealth and the World Trade Organization (WTO), considering in particular how smallness has variously been articulated in terms of what small states either cannot or will not do.
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