Judicial Politics and International Cooperation

This excellent book presents an original account of judicial politics in the WTO. The authors demonstrate persuasively that the strengthening of enforcement in the WTO has had important consequences for the domestic politics of trade in member countries. For its thoughtful arguments and rich empirical basis, this book deserves to become a key reference in the literature on judicial politics in international relations. -- Andreas Dür, University of Salzburg

Poletti and De Bièvre investigate in this book the fascinating nexus between the judicial arm of the World Trade Organization and its rule-making capacities. They offer a novel and nuanced argument by fully integrating domestic interest group dynamics into their theory. Their book further presents a number of highly insightful case studies to tease out the projected linkages. This book is a must-read for students of IPE and those interested in understanding the true (and underappreciated) effects of judicial systems in global economic governance. -- Manfred Elsig, University of Bern

This volume on the political economy of the judicial process in the realm of trade liberalisation makes a meaningful contribution to the literature on the subject. The authors have already made their mark through joint and individual works on this score. In this volume, they take their thinking one step further, inquiring into the manner in which adjudication of disputes can be a catalyst for agreements in the WTO. This thought-provoking book is a must-read for all theoreticians and practitioners in the field of international trade. -- Petros C Mavroidis, Columbia Law School

Dirk De Bièvre is Associate Professor of international politics and international political economy at the University of Antwerp (Flanders, Belgium). He studied in Leuven, Louvain-la-Neuve, and Konstanz, and obtained his PhD in Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in San Domenico di Fiesole in 2002. He is the author of numerous articles on European trade policy, the World Trade Organization, and interest group politics. Before joining the Antwerp Faculty in 2006, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, and an EU and Volkswagen Foundation research fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES). He occasionally taught at the universities of Brussels, Mannheim, Dresden, Leuven, and was a visiting fellow at the Department of Government of the London School of Economics and Political Science during the academic year 2014/15.

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Arlo Poletti is Assistant Professor of International Public Policy at the University LUISS Guido Carli (Rome, Italy) where he teaches international relations and international public policy. His research interests focus on the political economy of trade policy making, WTO judicial politics and interest groups’ lobbying. He has published on these topics in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Regulation & Governance, West European Politics, Comparative European Politics and other outlets. Recently, he published a monographic study The European Union and Multilateral Trade Governance: The Politics of the Doha Round with Routledge. He obtained a PhD from the University of Bologna (Italy) and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science of the University of Antwerp (Belgium).