The intersection between indigenous rights and international economic agreements is paradigmatic of the ways in which globalization accommodates issues of social and economic justice. This intersection provides insight into the fate of the marginalized communities in a system that privileges certain values and goals often incompatible with some indigenous values and goals. The prior chapters make evident that, to address social and economic justice, international economic agreements can start by addressing indigenous interests in a systemic and more encompassing way and lead the way to frameworks for better social and economic inclusion. This is the key litmus test for the very legitimacy of international economic law after crises derived from a nationalistic turn and exacerbated by a global pandemic. This chapter offers some basic recommendations.

This chapter provides the assessment of the intersection – that between international economic law and indigenous rights – coined in this book as international indigenous economic law. The author asserts that there is an important place for indigenous rights within the field of international economic law. Indeed, an international indigenous economic law, one that focuses on the vulnerable and marginalized, can provide a limited yet important pathway for improving the unequal distribution of the benefits of globalization and for moving beyond the standard conversations among mainstream and classical economists and policymakers that the redistribution of wealth and power should be purely domestic policy responses. This claim has implication for international economic law and indigenous rights scholars alike.

The main criticisms of globalization fail to fully capture the interests of indigenous peoples. On the one hand, the challenges based on relative gains rarely advocate from the perspective of indigenous peoples or take into account the experiences of these communities in their arguments. In general, these perspectives completely ignore both the specific protections of indigenous peoples and the ways in which these groups can effectively participate by integrating into a cosmopolitan community more welcoming of these experiences, often assuming that, as the relative losers, they are uninterested in incremental change and participation. This may not be true for all indigenous groups. On the other hand, perspectives based on absolute losses have been adopted by indigenous advocates who argue for systemic change, but fail to fully grasp this group’s interests. Regrettably, the sustainability perspective often disregards the interest of indigenous groups of participating in the gradual exploitation of their territories and resources.

Katherine Adams’s “‘This Is Especially Our Crop’: Blackness, Value, and the Reconstruction of Cotton” thinks deeply about that historical record’s ties to materiality, labor, and “worth.” Adams focuses on writing that promoted cotton as a site for Black economic self-determination – specifically on how writers negotiated the double bind of racial capitalism, simultaneously countering predictions that freedpeople could not become economic producers without white coercion and resisting the reduction of Black personhood to economic value. Analyzing texts from Martin Delany, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and diverse other authors for the Black periodical press, Adams shows how African American writers and thinkers complicated the putative opposition between capitalist and human value by laying claim to both, appropriating the logic of cotton capitalism in order to inscribe Black personhood within its aporia.

This book offers pathways to extricate indigenous peoples from the impacts of economic globalization. It examines the complex interactions between human and economic-focused areas of international law – international economic law and human rights law mainly with one particular frame, that of the groups subjugated and marginalized by the process of globalization. I assert that, the ones truly left behind by the current form of economic interconnection are inter alia indigenous peoples. Their voices have been only slightly and recently taken into account in this current wave of contestation, and their perspective may provide a path for organizing transformational action. International economic law should enable the dissemination of core values of international law – human rights law in particular. In spite of their overlapping principles, a blind spot of international economic law is the limited engagement with the different notions of responsibility toward the planet that indigenous peoples often demonstrate. The author shares his years of practice and teaching experiences, which will be of use to international economic law lawyers and indigenous rights advocates.

The global ascendancy of neoliberal economics has deepened inequalities between and within nations and largely undermined efforts toward sustainable development. Based on a belief that the market should be the organizing principle for social, political and economic decisions, policymakers in many countries promoted privatization of state activities and an increased role for the free market, flexibility in labor markets and trade and investment liberalization. The benefits of these policies frequently fail to reach the indigenous peoples of the world, who acutely feel their costs, such as environmental degradation, cultural dispossessions and loss of traditional lands and territories. As vulnerable and often marginalized segments of the world’s population, indigenous peoples are at a heightened risk of experiencing the negative consequences of globalization. Understanding this reality could provide pathways for effective interventions to alleviate, overcome or, at the very least, minimize such effects.

The intersection between indigenous rights and international economic law serves as an instructive lens of the complex interactions between human and economic-focused areas of international law. Specifically, it uncovers how two fields with distinct goals, rules and structures are implicated in the way globalization both affects and tries to protect marginalized communities. Since both fields can also complement each other to improve the situation of almost one billion marginalized indigenous peoples, international economic law can incorporate the struggle for social inclusion espoused by human rights law as it relates to indigenous peoples, as argued in Chapter 6. This final chapter briefly provides first, a reflection on how to rethink the failure of globalization with indigenous peoples in mind. It further outlines the normative underpinnings of an inclusive globalization that can provide more hope for those marginalized by the current structure created by international economic law.

This chapter explores the relationship between labor activism along global supply chains and labor politics in China. In particular, it investigates the extent to which Chinese workers have been involved in transnational labor networks, and the nature of their involvement. To date there is no systematic documentation of Chinese labor involvement in transnational campaigns, let alone campaigns specifically involving supply chains, in part because the repression of workers and activists by the authoritarian state presents challenges for empirical research. Nevertheless, this chapter offers an original analysis of five global union federations’ inclusion of Chinese labor in their transnational activities. The analysis reveals three categories of global unions’ engagement with Chinese workers or companies: (1) direct cooperation with Chinese workers, (2) solidarity actions on behalf of Chinese workers, and (3) campaigns on behalf of non-Chinese workers employed by Chinese companies. These findings provide a starting point that can inform future research on the relationship between global supply chains, transnational labor alliances, and the politics of workers’ rights in China.

This chapter examines the evolution of China’s outward-looking political-economy model that has defined the purpose of and receptivity to GSCs in recent decades. It first provides significant empirical evidence for the past contribution of Western-linked GSCs -- specially through forward participation -- to China’s economic growth, employment and earnings, expanding middle class, urbanization, and its development of technological capabilities. We then turn to limiting bottlenecks and emerging challenges, identifying three stylized responses among China’s leaders: “GSC preservers,” “GSC reformers,” and “GSC replacers.” The costs and risks of more extreme decoupling from Western GSCs may explain why radical inward-looking options may have been overpowered by their alternatives until recently. However, Covid-19 introduced starker dilemmas into an already charged geopolitical relationship. While the battle over the emerging GSC landscape will continue to be fought primarily within China, the Trump shocks have dealt a heavy political blow to “GSC preservers.” As the effects of Covid-19 are overlaid on geopolitical tensions, the odds that mutually beneficial outcomes -- including the survival of GSCs as we knew them -- can still reemerge out of the current conundrum, remain unclear.

As all chapters were being readied for submission, Covid-19 erupted furiously in early 2020, compelling the effort to incorporate the pandemic’s initial effects on GSCs, the trade and technology war, and international relations within East Asia, in real time. Chapter 13 is, therefore, a postscript distilling findings from Parts I and II prior to Covid-19 while addressing the latter’s early effects on the chapters’ respective arguments. It then analyzes the strategies GSCs have embarked on in response to both geopolitical and pandemic shocks, building largely on preliminary 2020 survey data. Covid-19 accelerated the cumulative impact of geopolitical shocks and rising inward-oriented hyper-nationalist models, making GSCs more vulnerable than at any time since their initial expansion in the 1990s. Their ongoing restructuring and efforts to reduce overreliance on China suggest a potential decline in China’s status as factory of the world relative to the past, but hardly its demise. Migration out of China and reshoring remain more the anomaly than the norm for now. There is still uncertainty, however, as to whether geopolitics, technological competition, and the legacy of Covid-19 could unleash even more sizable disruptions in the global geography of production.

Chapter 1 introduces the broader framework for the volume and its place in the broader literature on the relationship between economic interdependence and international cooperation and conflict. It draws attention to the deeper political origins of GSCs in the grand strategies of outward-oriented political survival models and identifies some of the pivotal questions regarding the broader role of GSCs in the international relations of East Asia. A focus on GSCs is especially pertinent to our world time as East Asia faces the most complex bundle of geopolitical and geo-economic threats in decades. This provides a natural experiment of sorts for gauging the extent to which GSCs may provide a more resilient foundation for interstate cooperation than older forms of interdependence have at various historical junctures or, alternatively, whether they amount to equally vulnerable targets of nationalistic and autarkic ambitions, inward-looking turns in the US and China, the trade and technology war, and other geopolitical shocks from within the region. Finally, the chapter introduces the rest of the volume, with different chapters addressing various dimensions of the relationship between GSCs and changing features of East Asian and Asia-Pacific international relations.

The Trump administration’s multi-front trade war dramatically escalated with the imposition of extraordinary tariffs on Chinese imports in 2018. Corporate America has responded with a concerted campaign of resistance. We document these efforts – through extensive participation in notice and comment and public coalition-building – and show that corporate opposition to the trade war is primarily a consequence of firms' sourcing and production linkages with China. In contrast, we find far weaker efforts by anti-trade firms to support the trade war, whether to insulate themselves from import competition or to confront Chinese trade practices. We therefore describe and empirically illustrate the politics of global production networks, and highlight that scholars of trade politics should not neglect opposition to the Trump trade agenda arising from globally integrated firms. Global order in the area of trade hangs in the balance in an ongoing fight between corporate globalism and populist nationalism.

Verdirame argues that liberal internationalism has undergone a largely undetected yet profound transformation in the last decades. As a result of an often unquestioning embrace of the political and legal ideology supranationalism and of globalization, liberal internationalists have slouched towards cosmopolitanism. Yet, cosmopolitanism is a view of the international political order that is at odds with liberal internationalism properly understood. Today’s liberal internationalists, like cosmopolitans, regard world government as both an aspiration and an inevitability. The idea of self-government, which was central to the liberal internationalism of the UN Charter, plays little or no role in this world view. This transformation of liberal internationalism is more evident in Europe, where supranationalism is not merely an ideology but the defining legal and political principle of the EU.

Discusses empirical examples showing how the preference for individual-level explanation – that is, for psychological, social-psychological, and microeconomic explanation – has limited the explanation of a wide range of macrosocial outcomes: of European economic history, of postindustrial development, of world economic development and globalization generally.