Description
How does geopolitical pressure travel through multilateral institutions? We answer this question through one concrete conduit: trade concerns at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Trade concerns are committee-based interactions through which members contest, coordinate, and cooperate on trade and regulatory policy. We construct a novel dataset of more than 30,000 member interventions across five WTO committees from 1995 to 2025, identifying the states involved, the affected products and industries, and the policy measures at issue. Combining these data with text analysis, coalition networks, and interviews, we show that technical cooperation is politically exposed but not politically subsumed. Participation patterns are mainly driven by economic interdependence: members are substantially more likely to raise concerns against partners whose markets matter for their exports. While our results also suggest that geopolitical alignment can matter for the politics of initiation, political distance and rivalry do not systematically predict more confrontational objectives, more intense language, or more securitized framing. We further find that institutional design matters: states rely more on security and geopolitical framings in more political committees, while more technical committees act as effective buffers against politicization. Technical forums thus provide an important site where cooperation can persist under political strain by being channeled through institutional routines, technical procedures, and repeated interaction.