IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/polstu/v62y2014i2p435-451.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does the WTO Violate Human Rights (and Do I Help It)? Beyond the Metaphor of Culpability for Systemic Global Poverty

Author

Listed:
  • Saladin Meckled-Garcia

Abstract

type="main"> 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Saladin Meckled-Garcia, 2014. "Does the WTO Violate Human Rights (and Do I Help It)? Beyond the Metaphor of Culpability for Systemic Global Poverty," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 62(2), pages 435-451, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:polstu:v:62:y:2014:i:2:p:435-451
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1467-9248.12036
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:polstu:v:62:y:2014:i:2:p:435-451. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0032-3217 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.