Suchergebnisse

1. Of value and its measurement : derivatives and the challenge of financial uncertainty -- 2. Of value and the contingency of its law : the (still) hidden abode of reproduction -- 3. Value making in financial and trading arrangements : of provocations and perspectival seeing -- 4. Re/production as the nexus : the (non)wage labour and alternative valorisations.

Introduction - the failure and the promise of the multilateral trading regime --Bretton Woods Conference: trade and the 'civilising mission' in the postwar international trading regime --'Science of development' and the Gatt Norm --Neo-liberal transformation of development thinking and the renewed mission of the multilateral trading regime --Uruguay round and the construction of the new consensus --World Trade Organisation : the power of transnational capital and the reduction of domestic regulatory space --Of failures and promises: the many lives of the Doha development round --Conclusions - the development mission of the WTO.

Abstract
This article has three aims. First, it takes issue with the argument of international economic institutions according to which states need to adopt deeper trade and investment commitments to sustain value chain trade if they wish to either 'develop' or continue being competitive in the global economy. It scrutinizes the evidence on the basis of which this argument is formulated and finds it to be tenuous at best. It also finds that current data is unable to account for the variety of factors that contribute to so-called 'social downgrade' – that is, the deterioration of working and living conditions, including the presence of informal and migrant workers. Second, it draws on feminist political economy to make sense of the co-existence of 'economic upgrade' and 'social downgrade' in global value chains. Specifically, it adopts a social reproduction lens to shed a light on the increasingly relevant, but invisibilized and/or devalued, role that social reproductive labour and informal labour play in processes of trans/national value creation. Third, it argues that a social reproduction lens can offer valuable insights on international economic agreements and the impact of their provisions on the ability of states and communities to improve working and living conditions.

This article has three aims. First, it takes issue with the argument of international economic institutions according to which states need to adopt deeper trade and investment commitments to sustain value chain trade if they wish to either 'develop' or continue being competitive in the global economy. It scrutinizes the evidence on the basis of which this argument is formulated and finds it to be tenuous at best. It also finds that current data is unable to account for the variety of factors that contribute to so-called 'social downgrade' – that is, the deterioration of working and living conditions, including the presence of informal and migrant workers. Second, it draws on feminist political economy to make sense of the co-existence of 'economic upgrade' and 'social downgrade' in global value chains. Specifically, it adopts a social reproduction lens to shed a light on the increasingly relevant, but invisibilized and/or devalued, role that social reproductive labour and informal labour play in processes of trans/national value creation. Third, it argues that a social reproduction lens can offer valuable insights on international economic agreements and the impact of their provisions on the ability of states and communities to improve working and living conditions.

In this paper I reflect on recent attempts by feminist economists to engage with post-Keynsian policies aimed at the socialisation of investment, in particular the proposal for the government to act at once as the Employer of Last Resort (ELR) and a social provider. Such an engagement seems to depart from feminist autonomists' critique of the wage society, their refusal to place reformist demands on the state and their emphasis on the collectivisation of social reproduction. Drawing on earlier explorations by Italian feminists of the dynamic interaction between labour and value, I suggest that these two approaches might not be as different as they first appear: at stake for both is a challenge to capitalist value through the promotion of arrangements able to instantiate alternative processes of valorisation.

This article takes its cue from Desai's critique of the new communists of the commons, particularly her claim that their project is built upon a series of misunderstandings about the dynamics of capital accumulation, the production of value in post-Fordism and the concept of the 'commons' itself. Focusing on earlier explorations by Italian feminists of the dynamic interaction between labour and value, the contribution this article makes to the commons debate is three-fold: first, it argues that the most interesting insights emerging from immaterial/cognitive/affective labour theories on which Italian post-workerists rely to put forward a renewed understanding of the commons derive from this feminist body of work. Secondly it shows how, despite being relied upon, the radical potential of this work has been limited by positing a qualitative shift to post-Fordist production that pays little attention to the important connections between labour and value that make up our common world. Finally, the article focuses exactly on this potential, that is, the challenge to capitalist value through the instantiation of other processes of valorisation, in light of the current attack on social reproduction.

This article engages with debates concerning the regulation of financial derivatives and, in particular, with the assumption according to which their speculative 'excesses' can be effectively curbed so to restore an otherwise healthy system of production, usually the industrial/manufacturing one, endowed with a 'real' value separate from that produced by financial markets. Arguing that derivatives complicate such an assumption, the article asks the question of how to act when the 'value' they refer to becomes contested. In this respect it explores the potential of the Ecuadorian Proposal for a New Regional Financial Architecture to act in the face of the contestability of value of exchange rates and, in so doing, to represent an alternative to the real/financial economy split and the regulatory debate as carried out so far.

This article contributes to the current debate on the meaning and regulation of biotechnology by focusing on the role that the concepts of nature and sound science play in framing struggles against agricultural biotechnology in India. It contends that the political work of these concepts consists of limiting democratic deliberation by neatly separating facts from values and scientific certainty from politics. In particular, it aims to show that both the invocation of nature and reliance on sound science are counterproductive for the more interesting challenges opponents are already articulating outside the boundaries drawn by the nature/society, science/politics and facts/ values distinctions. Indeed, the political significance of the collective experimentations going on in India (as elsewhere) is that they signal a shift from a risk mentality, centred on 'hard facts' supposed to settle the debate, to novel approaches to uncertainty that recognize the increasing controversies surrounding GMOs. These approaches, it is argued, provide a more interesting space for thinking about the uncertainty surrounding biotechnological crops and the relations we (might) share with them.

In Vol 2, No 2 of feminists@law (2012) we published our response to the Finch Report as an Editorial titled 'Why We Oppose Gold Open Access'. Five years later, it is timely to take stock of what has happened since the Finch Report and to revisit our assessment of the government's and research funders' open access (OA) policies. Our focus in this Editorial is on journal publishing in Law and more generally in Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) rather than in the STEM disciplines, on which much of the OA literature since Finch has been based. We consider first how the market in OA has developed since 2012, and secondly how the OA ecosystem now appears, before finally making proposals for the future.

ABSTRACT
This article explores the central role of formalization in the history and functioning of international economic law. International economic law, in constituting and managing a 'modern' world economy, has relied on what we call 'the dream of formality'. This dream gives a sense of internal coherence and future totality to international economic law. It enables international economic law to claim awareness and progressive inclusion of socio-economic and legal relations outside the 'formal' modern economy while enabling a regime of differentiation of the so-called 'surplus'—often racialized—population. In a world where 'informality' is the norm and 'formality' is the exception, formalization's colonial origins have evolved into a fully-fledged regime of social management and value extraction. This regime has embedded itself in international labour law and human rights, as well as in areas of international economic law such as Aid for Trade and Global Value Chains. Building on contemporary debates on racial and post-colonial capitalism, we focus on Colombia's informal economy to illustrate the elusiveness of the dream of formality, and how current exercises of othering underpin today's practices of 'racialization otherwise'. Our question, then, is: what would international economic law look like if it did not follow the dream of formality but instead embraced the challenge of sustaining life?