Description
International trade agreements have the power to instigate, perpetuate, or transform inequalities that exist between and within states. Recognising the limitations of existing, largely neoclassical, approaches to international trade, Hannah et al. recently put forth a proposal for a ‘feminist trade agenda’ including the need to: redefine the purpose of global trade to value and support “progressive forms of social reproduction”; centre trade policy within a more holistic understanding of the economy; and democratize global trade relations (2020). What is missing from this analysis are ways that global trade relations and theory were developed through European colonial dominance, extraction, and exploitation: these relationships and theories are maintained today with limited interrogation or understanding of their imperial origins. This paper builds on the proposed feminist agenda for trade of Hannah et al. by articulating a feminist decolonizing approach to international political economy. A feminist decolonizing approach understands that decolonisation is an ongoing process that problematizes the naturalization of existing power dynamics and inequalities in the global political economy, seeks to embed history into our understanding of present-day economic relations, and works toward the just and equitable transformation of the extant white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, capitalist trade model. I apply this novel framework in analysing the core principles of ‘free trade’ theory as they are employed and promoted by the World Trade Organization today: namely, comparative advantage, reciprocity, and non-discrimination, and the increasingly prominent principle of transparency. In doing so, the paper contributes to the growing literature highlighting the injustices of trade theory and practice, and proposes alternative objectives for the global trading system that recognise, and seek to remedy, the inequalities of the global economic system.
