The Editorial Board of the Journal of International Economic Law is seeking papers for a forthcoming special issue on ‘Trade Wars’, planned for publication in late 2019.
This special issue seeks to take stock of the current trade wars, provide an explanation of their causes and conditions of possibility, and offer reflections on the best responses to them, both in the short term and looking further ahead. Starting from the premise that the structure of the international economic order may be at a point of inflection, it both aims to set this moment in context, and to offer ideas for what international economic law could and should look like looking ahead.
One of the aims of the special issue is to produce a coherent set of papers which collectively takes a broader view than much of the existing literature. While each paper would include a focus on specific pragmatic issues, they would ideally do so with an explicit appreciation of, and reflection on, the broader systemic issues which may underlie them.
It is currently envisaged that the Special Issue will be organized around three broad themes. First, what is happening this time around, how is it differentiated historically, and what new concerns arise? Second, what are some of the economic, political, and systemic conflicts that triggered the current crisis? Third, at the systemic level, what new rules are needed in order to address the current conflicts? Indicative topics and questions include:
- How does the current set of trade wars compare to similar periods in history, both in terms of the instruments used, and their likely economic and other effects?
- How has the political economy of protectionism been transformed by the transnationalisation of production and the multi-decade consolidation of global value chains? Can we still understand the politics of protectionism within the classical political economy story of trade? Or do we need to rethink the model by incorporating new variables, or by enriching it with insights from behavioral economics?
- If US-China trade frictions are at the heart of the present problems, the deeper issue may be the emergence of new market and quasi-market forms across the globe. How has the global economic order dealt with institutional diversity of this kind before? How can it, and how should it, do so now?
- What may be the larger systemic consequences of the emergence of China’s Belt and Road initiative, particularly in the context of the potential disintegration of the multilateral system? How are these two trends likely to play out, and what might be the structure of the new order which is emerging?
- For the first time, at least since WW2, trade wars are now bound up with larger geopolitical struggles involving both economic and national security dimensions. How has this changed the politics and dynamics of the current trade wars? What does the national security framing mean for the possibility of negotiated solutions?
- The United States is re-orienting its export control regime in order to deal with concerns over the transfer of technology to potentially hostile countries. Doing so unilaterally has raised questions of effectiveness and cost for American companies. How was the multilateral export control regime negotiated and managed during the cold war, and are there lessons for today? How might such export controls play out from a development perspective?
Proposals of no more than 750 words should be submitted by email to [email protected] by 30 November 2018. For those proposals accepted, completed manuscripts of 6000-8000 words are to be submitted for peer review by 1 June 2018. Selected authors will also have an opportunity to present their paper at the G2 (Georgetown Law – Graduate Institute) Annual WTO Conference in Geneva, planned for June 7-8, 2019.
Proposals are specifically encouraged from scholars working in the global South.
Anne van Aaken
Chad Bown
Andrew Lang
(Editors of the Special Issue)
