World Trade Law After Neoliberalism Reimagining the Global Economic Order

Provides an innovative account of the perceived tension between free trade and human rights, setting out and critically examining the assumptions underlying this debate
Gives a full overview of the social history of the trade and human rights debate
Suggests a new framework for the trade and human rights debate, focusing on the WTO's role in bringing together the expert knowledge and informal relationships that drive states' behaviour in the international economic order
The rise of economic liberalism in the latter stages of the 20th century coincided with a fundamental transformation of international economic governance, especially through the law of the World Trade Organization. In this book, Andrew Lang provides a new account of this transformation, and considers its enduring implications for international law. Against the commonly-held idea that 'neoliberal' policy prescriptions were encoded into WTO law, Lang argues that the last decades of the 20th century saw a reinvention of the international trade regime, and a reconstitution of its internal structures of knowledge.

In addition, the book explores the way that resistance to economic liberalism was expressed and articulated over the same period in other areas of international law, most prominently international human rights law. It considers the promise and limitations of this form of 'inter-regime' contestation, arguing that measures to ensure greater collaboration and cooperation between regimes may fail in their objectives if they are not accompanied by a simultaneous destabilization of each regime's structures of knowledge and characteristic features. With that in mind, the book contributes to a full and productive contestation of the nature and purpose of global economic governance.

Readership: Scholars and post-graduate students of the theory of international law, with a particular focus on conflict between different sub-areas of law; scholars and post-graduate students of international human rights law and international trade law.