The Post-TRIPS Reckoning: IP Nationalism and Asia’s Challenge to Global Governance

The global intellectual property (IP) order, once consolidated by the post-TRIPS consensus, is now fracturing under the rise of ‘IP nationalism.’ Across Asia, states are recalibrating their IP regimes not to reassure foreign investors, but to advance domestic priorities of health, innovation, and technological self-reliance. India relies on public health safeguards in patent law, China deploys anti-monopoly rules against foreign technology holders, and Southeast Asian countries pursue digital autonomy, marking a deliberate shift from TRIPS-plus harmonisation toward development-first governance. These policies inevitably generate friction, straining the World Trade Organisation (WTO) framework and raising the spectre of investor-state arbitration. However, to characterise this trend as fragmentation is to miss its deeper significance. This chapter reframes IP nationalism as an assertion of developmental sovereignty: a principled counterweight and necessary corrective to the structural inequities embedded in the global IP architecture. The author argues that this political-legal contestation is powerfully accelerated by disruptive technologies, such as additive manufacturing and artificial intelligence (AI), which provide states with the material means to bypass the chokepoints of the traditional IP system. By leveraging both legal interpretation and technological empowerment, these states are not merely breaching rules, but actively reshaping them from the periphery. In doing so, they expose the fiction of a ‘neutral’ legal order, forcing international economic law to reckon more openly with its distributive biases. The choice now confronting the global system is stark: adapt to a new reality of legal and technological pluralism, or risk sliding into irrelevance.