Away from the Global North: new directions in the politics of trade

This chapter argues that more scholarly attention in international political economy (IPE) needs to be devoted to the trade politics of the Global South. For decades, mainstream knowledge production in (IPE) has occurred in the Global North and/or relied on empirical assessments of these developed countries. Future scholarly inquiry should be focused along two inter-related dimensions: (1) understanding trade policy preferences in the Global South and (2) examining the emerging contours of South-South trade cooperation and policymaking, such as the proliferation of South-South preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and the role of developing nations in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Examining these empirical domains will expand our knowledge of the IPE of trade, and improve the generalization of existing claims, increasing the accuracy of deeply held theoretical assumptions and trade policy models.