Suchergebnisse

The global intellectual property (IP) regime is in the midst of a paradigm shift in favour of greater access to protected work. Current explanations of this paradigm shift emphasize the agency of transnational advocacy networks, but ignore the role of academics. Scholars interested in global IP politics have failed to engage in reflexive thinking. Building on the results from a survey of 1679 IP experts, this article argues that a community of academics successfully broke the policy monopoly of practitioners over IP expertise. They instilled some scepticism concerning the social and economic impacts of IP among their students as well as in the broader community of IP experts. They also provided expert knowledge that was widely amplified by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and some intergovernmental organizations, acting as echo chambers to reach national decision makers. By making these claims, this article illustrates how epistemic communities actively collaborate with other transnational networks, rather than competing with them, and how they can promote a paradigm change by generating, rather than reducing, uncertainty. Adapted from the source document.

This introduction to the special section on European liberal discourses; presents key assumptions discussed in the collection of articles, such as liberalism as a discourse and the conceptualization of discourses as networks; offers an original typology of liberal discourses regarding State intervention; introduces two models linking discursive interactions to discursive change, analogous to the operational code approach and to schema theory in cognitive science. Presents original data on DG Trade discourse, to illustrate simultaneous change and continuity. This introduction to the special section on European liberal discourses discusses three themes covered by all contributions: (i) the co-existence of several market liberal discourses in the European public sphere; (ii) interactions among these various discourses; (iii) and discursive changes resulting from these interactions. Adapted from the source document.

The first section of this article arranges the four theoretical approaches and methods presented in the special issues - namely interpretative constructivism, post-structuralism, discursive institutionalism and critical discourse analysis - along two dimensions: (a) the role of discourse in the constitution of the world, depending on whether approaches perceive social structure as being constitutive of or constituted by discourse; and (b) interpretation of the weight of material and ideational elements in discourses. This model helps to make sense of the profound theoretical diversity that characterises analytical approaches to international relations discourse. The second section tackles the question of 'who does the speaking'. It identifies the different voices that converge in the EU's international choir and problematises the discursive environment that forges international discourses through the theoretical lenses of selected approaches. In the last section, the contributions to this special issue are presented. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright NISA.]