A dialogic approach to understanding regime conflicts: the case of the development agenda

Abstract

Despite the fact that early work on international regimes conceptualised them as dialogic in nature, this fundamental regime property has remained relatively underdeveloped. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle, this article proposes a dialogic framework for understanding regimes and the political struggles that constitute them. Focusing on the contextual and relational properties of signification processes within a regime, one of the key arguments is that neither their dialogic nature nor the trajectory and outcome of a particular conflict can be understood without giving full attention to language as a power-laden form of action. By focusing on how language and discourse are implicated and put to work in a particular instance of regime contestation, namely the Development Agenda proposed by a group of developing countries’ representatives at the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2004, efforts are made not only to bring to the fore the political and ideological nature of the ‘shared understandings’ without which a regime would not exist, but also the manner in which they are reproduced and reinvigorated, even by acts that set out to challenge them.