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<p>This essay, memorialising a keynote address delivered at O.P. Jindal Global University in March 2024, applies a legal realist, socio-legal lens to the intersection of political economy, health, and trade. Taking global COVID-19 vaccine inequity stark disparities in vaccination rates between high- and low-income countries, vaccine hoarding and waste, and the prolonged struggle over the TRIPS waiver as its point of departure, the essay argues that the relationship between trade law and public health cannot be explained by either legal positivism or crude structural determinism, but only by tracing the historical conditions and actual outcomes that shape it. The argument unfolds across three interconnected threads. The first examines the right to health and the treatment of "non-trade" concerns within international economic law, focusing on the TRIPS Agreement, the 2001 Doha Declaration, and the persistently permissive rather than mandatory legal form through which public health flexibilities have been granted- a pattern the essay also traces in the Kimberley Process on conflict diamonds. The second thread situates this within the longer decolonial struggle for sovereign equality in multilateral institutions, from the GATT's origins as a small club through the Enabling Clause, the Generalized System of Preferences, and the informal "Green Room" dynamics that have historically concentrated power among a few states. The third thread turns to TWAIL, race, and gender analyses as critical resources for reimagining international economic law from the ground up. The essay concludes that legal rules and the social and political mobilisation surrounding them are mutually constitutive, and calls for a dynamic model of trade that accounts for its distributive effects across employment, health, labour, environment, class, race, and gender.</p>

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A tapestry of influence: Weaving the threads of political economy, health, and trade into the global fabric

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年8月4日

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  • Chantal Thomas

摘要

This essay, memorialising a keynote address delivered at O.P. Jindal Global University in March 2024, applies a legal realist, socio-legal lens to the intersection of political economy, health, and trade. Taking global COVID-19 vaccine inequity stark disparities in vaccination rates between high- and low-income countries, vaccine hoarding and waste, and the prolonged struggle over the TRIPS waiver as its point of departure, the essay argues that the relationship between trade law and public health cannot be explained by either legal positivism or crude structural determinism, but only by tracing the historical conditions and actual outcomes that shape it. The argument unfolds across three interconnected threads. The first examines the right to health and the treatment of "non-trade" concerns within international economic law, focusing on the TRIPS Agreement, the 2001 Doha Declaration, and the persistently permissive rather than mandatory legal form through which public health flexibilities have been granted- a pattern the essay also traces in the Kimberley Process on conflict diamonds. The second thread situates this within the longer decolonial struggle for sovereign equality in multilateral institutions, from the GATT's origins as a small club through the Enabling Clause, the Generalized System of Preferences, and the informal "Green Room" dynamics that have historically concentrated power among a few states. The third thread turns to TWAIL, race, and gender analyses as critical resources for reimagining international economic law from the ground up. The essay concludes that legal rules and the social and political mobilisation surrounding them are mutually constitutive, and calls for a dynamic model of trade that accounts for its distributive effects across employment, health, labour, environment, class, race, and gender.