Meckled-Garcia, S;
(2014)
Does the WTO Violate Human Rights (and Do I Help It)? Beyond the Metaphor of Culpability for Systemic Global Poverty.
Political Studies
, 62
(2)
435 - 451.
10.1111/1467-9248.12036.
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Abstract
I challenge an influential analysis (the ‘participation account’) that attributes human rights violations to the global economic system, and attributes complicity with those violations to citizens of affluent countries. The participation account is shown to rest on a faulty account of wrongful action. An alternative, and superior, account of wrongful action (the ‘agency account’) is proposed, and used to analyse the rules of the global economic order. These include the ‘foreground rules’ of trade agreements and the ‘background rules’ of state privileges. The agency account identifies wrongful action with unreasonably imposing losses/risks. The systemic bad effects of the economic system and its rules are shown not to be due to agents in the system acting unreasonably in this sense. The metaphor that the economic system ‘violates rights’ and that we act in complicity with this are thus shown not to stand up to analysis.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Does the WTO Violate Human Rights (and Do I Help It)? Beyond the Metaphor of Culpability for Systemic Global Poverty |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/1467-9248.12036 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12036 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2013 The Author. Political Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Political Studies Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | WTO, poverty, human rights violations, global economic order, complicity |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Political Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1364694 |
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