Since the 2008 economic meltdown, market-driven globalization has posed new challenges for governments. This collection introduces the innovative concept of “grey zones” of global governance, where international rules are bent or ignored. These zones are significant, contested spaces for state policy and market behaviour to interact with respect to trade, the environment, food security, and investment. Powerful incentives exist in the global economy for states to harmonize their policies through trade and investment agreements. But grey zones both promote uniformity in many areas of public life and facilitate diverse forms of capitalism in market societies. They enable governments to balance national and global economic benefits as they advance their core interests. At a time of growing nationalist sentiment, Grey Zones in International Economic Law and Global Governance explores creative local engagement with international economic law and offers a bold new way to understand public concerns about international trade and investment, food security, green energy, subsidies, and anti-dumping actions.

Critics of the World Trade Organization argue that its binding dispute settlement process imposes a neoliberal agenda on member states. If this is the case, why would any nation agree to participate? Jacqueline Krikorian explores this question by examining the impact of the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism on domestic policies in the United States and Canada. She demonstrates that the WTO’s ability to influence domestic arrangements has been constrained by three factors: judicial deference, institutional arrangements, and strategic decision making by political elites in Ottawa and Washington. By bringing the insights of law and politics scholarship to bear on a subject matter traditionally addressed by international relations scholars, Krikorian shows that the classic division in political science between these two fields of study, though suitable in the postwar era, is outdated in the context of a globalized world.

Globally, isolationism and protectionism are on the rise, and resurgent authoritarian nations are reasserting the centrality of the sovereign state. And with China’s influence around the world intensifying, the dynamic interrelationship of the national and supranational in shaping norms of good governance has become increasingly relevant. Good Governance in Economic Development critically examines the ways in which transparency and accountability mechanisms are incorporated or reflected in international trade, finance, and investment regimes. It also explores the Chinese state’s engagement with these norms, shedding new light not only on how the principles of transparency, accountability, and public participation are applied within China, but also on the ability of China to affect international rules. Through close analysis of how norms are adapted locally, the contributors offer insights into the global and national implications of international good governance rules.

In Cultural Heritage in International Economic Law, Valentina Vadi offers an account of how international economic law contributes to global cultural governance, analysing the promises and pitfalls of such contributions.

Global Health Security in China, Japan, and India assesses evolving global health security in three major Asian countries that adhere to the standards and targets in accordance with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The COVID-19 pandemic has put a newfound emphasis on the importance of global health security: the idea that countries must cooperate to address international public health threats while meeting varied domestic health care needs. Balancing cost, affordability, stakeholder demands, political ideology, and global economic pressures, all three countries have made significant advances in health law and policy over the past decade.

China’s maritime “gray zone” operations represent a new challenge for the U.S. Navy and the sea services of our allies, partners, and friends in maritime East Asia. There, Beijing is waging what some Chinese sources term a “war without gunsmoke.” Already winning in important areas, China could gain far more if left unchecked. One of China’s greatest advantages thus far has been foreign difficulty in understanding the situation, let alone determining an effective response. With contributions from some of the world’s leading subject matter experts, this volume aims to close that gap by explaining the forces and doctrines driving China’s paranaval expansion, operating in the “gray zone” between war and peace. The book covers China’s major maritime forces beyond core gray-hulled Navy units, with particular focus on China’s second and third sea forces: the “white-hulled” Coast Guard and “blue-hulled” Maritime Militia. Increasingly, these paranaval forces, and the “gray zone” in which they typically operate, are on the frontlines of China’s seaward expansion.

Transnational Food Security addresses food security from an international relations, political economy and legal perspective analysing the relationship between food security and the environment and climate change, trade, finance and contracts, and the intersection between food and human rights. The topic of food concerns one of the most basic and profound aspects of human survival. Universal and equal access to food is, at the same time, ridden with problems of power, inequality, distribution and implicated in old and new geopolitical conflicts. As such, ‘food’ and food security are central to conditions of poverty and hunger, development and ‘modernisation’, transitional justice and rule of law reform around the world. As a problem of critique and scholarly inquiry, food prompts an inter-disciplinary assessment of the nature of food security in the modern world. The contributors to this book take us deep into the complexity of food and illustrate the challenges of adequately understanding and approaching questions of food security and food sovereignty in a globally interconnected world. Transnational Food Security will be of great interest to scholars of international relations, political economy, and transnational law. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Transnational Legal Theory Journal.

This is the first book to examine global political economy from a psychoanalytic perspective. It claims that the libidinal—the site of unconscious desire—plays not a supplementary or trivial, but a constitutive role in global political economy. Consumption, for example, is not simply a way of satisfying a material or biological need but a doomed attempt at soothing our deeply held sense of loss; and capital is not just a means to material growth and prosperity but is invested with "drive" that seduces, beguiles, and manipulates in the service of unending accumulation. Thus, in contrast to political economy, which assumes a rational subject, libidinal economy is founded on the notion of a desiring subject, who obeys a logic not of good sense or self-interest but profligacy and irrationality. By applying a psychoanalytic lens, Global Libidinal Economy thereby seeks to uncover the unconscious excesses and antagonisms emergent in such key political economy categories as "production," "trade," and "ecology," while also bringing out significant contemporary themes relating to "gender" and "race."

The Japan-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPPA) of 2018 is the most far-reaching 'megaregional' economic agreement in force, with several major countries beyond its eleven negotiating countries also interested. Still bearing the stamp of the original US involvement before the Trump-era reversal, TPP is the first instance of 'megaregulation': a demanding combination of inter-state economic ordering and national regulatory governance on a highly ambitious substantive and trans-regional scale. Its text and ambition have influenced other negotiations ranging from the Japan-EU Agreement (JEEPA) and the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to the projected Pan-Asian Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). This book provides an extensive analysis of TPP as a megaregulatory project for channelling and managing new pressures of globalization, and of core critical arguments made against economic megaregulation from standpoints of development, inequality, labour rights, environmental interests, corporate capture, and elite governance. Specialized chapters cover supply chains, digital economy, trade facilitation, intellectual property, currency levels, competition and state-owned enterprises, government procurement, investment, prescriptions for national regulation, and the TPP institutions. Country studies include detailed analyses of TPP-related politics and approaches in Japan, Mexico, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and Thailand. Contributors include leading practitioners and scholars in law, economics, and political science. At a time when the WTO and other global-scale institutions are struggling with economic nationalism and geopolitics, and bilateral and regional agreements are pressed by public disagreement and incompatibility with digital and capital and value chain flows, the megaregional ambition of TPP is increasingly important as a precedent requiring the close scrutiny this book presents.

On a global scale, the central tool for responding to complex security challenges is public international law. This handbook provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of the relationship between international law and global security.