WTO’s power, expert networks and intellectual property rights in Geneva

MÁXIMO BADARÓ

San Francisco, Estados Unidos

Congreso; Annual Meeting de la American Anthropological Association; 2008

American Anthropological Association

Academic papers, newspaper articles and social demonstrations highlight the power of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which tends to be associated with its capacity to shape politics, economics and social realities on local and global level.  The WTO is usually presented as one of the most important actors of “global power” or “global governance”. In spite of this, hardly any research show how this “power” is produced and represented inside the WTO. In order to look at this neglected aspect, I focus on one of the fields in which the WTO works: the relation between commerce and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). WTO negotiations on IPR involve in different ways a network of actors including members of its staff, diplomats and experts from country delegations, university professors, NGO consultants, and experts from other international organizations based in Geneva and abroad. This research report is based on a preliminary fieldwork among this network of actors and institutions. I draw attention to the need to approach the WTO as a place that embody and empower multiple agendas. I suggest that this organization offers to individual and collective actors involved in these networks the possibility to validate, accumulate or reconvert power linked with legitimating expertise, or to oppose to the development of other forms of power.