Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2021

DOI

10.1017/9781108861342.001

Abstract

This paper explains the methodology that I use for my work, and it comes from the Preface of my book Emerging Powers and the World Trading System: The Past and Future of International Economic Law. This approach has an important ethnographic dimension when ethnography is viewed in a broad (but non-traditional) sense of participant observation of a field. The object of the study is the flow of norms and institutional practices in the field of international trade law, and, to a lesser extent, the related fields of international investment and intellectual property law. It is not a traditional ethnography rooted in a specific location, but rather the place of study is multi-sited and “deterritorialized.” My approach entails sustained engagement with practitioners in multiple locations in different states over time. Within the case studies of Brazil, India, and China, the sites are likewise multiple, and include government offices, lawyer offices, trade association offices, think tanks, law schools, and embassies, located in different cities.

My method can be viewed as a form of “para-ethnography” given that many of my informants were equally interested in understanding the processes that I was studying. Para-ethnography entails the study of social processes through interviewing practitioners who are themselves engaged in “studies” of these processes because they aim to understand and respond to them. In this way, the interviews, in part, can be viewed as “collaborations” from the perspective of forays into “making sense” of developments in the trade law world. In this Preface I explain my interviewing and broader methodological process.

Publication Citation

Preface in, Emerging Powers and the World Trading System: The Past and Future of International Economic Law xiii - xxii (New York: Cambridge University Press 2021).

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