Patents and Pills, Power and Procedure: the North-south Politics of Public Health in the Wto
نویسندگان
چکیده
This article uses the contemporary international politics of intellectual property rights (IPRs) as a lens to examine North-South conflicts over international economic governance and the possibilities of institutional reform. Although developing countries have limited control over the distributional and substantive dimensions of international institutions, they retain an important stake in a rule-based international order. Because international institutions provide small states with a potential mechanism to bind more powerful states to mutually-recognized rules, developing countries may seek to strengthen multilateral institutions. Lacking the power to revise the substance of the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), developing countries subsequently designed strategies to operate within the constraining international political reality they faced. They sought to clarify the rules of international patent law, to affirm their rights established during the TRIPS negotiations and to minimize their vulnerability to opportunism by powerful states. Rather than undermine TRIPS, then, the developing countries strengthened global governance in IPRs. In preparing this paper I have benefited from discussions of the material with a number of people, including Tom Callaghy, Marcus Kurtz, Susan Martin, Christopher May, Monique Mrazek, Andrew Schrank, and Robert Wade.
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