Resistance at the WTO: (de)coloniality in the making?

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the growing global decoloniality process. As Mignolo noted, the process of decolonising knowledge and being is underway via spatializing the site of knowledge and linking them through the colonial epistemic power differential. Decoloniality discourse allows us to understand the continuity of colonial forms of domination produced by the colonial cultures and structures in the modern/colonial world system. Reframing the debate for reforms in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) within the decoloniality discourse, this paper demonstrates the continued colonial legacy in WTO negotiations and how it maintains the developing and developed countries’ divide at the cost of the institution itself. Examining the negotiation process leading to the Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies (AFS), it demonstrates global coloniality matrix is still operative at WTO. This paper recommends concerted efforts to dismantle the matrix of coloniality operating at three concurrent and interconnected levels in WTO. However, reforms are not the aim but the path to transformation of WTO- from a hegemonic universal rule-based system - towards an institution supporting a pluriversal global trade regime born out of epistemic democratisation embedding common experiences of the non-western world. Decolonial option starts from epistemic disobedience to the point of no return, only then transformation is possible. The epistemic disobedience and delinking from traditional trade law discourse in viewing WTO reforms in this paper is a step in that direction.