Getting to Yes: Lessons for a Transnational Activist

Abstract

Leif Wenar argues, in Blood Oil, that the current rules governing natural resource exploitation by governments leaves too much room for the sale of a country’s natural resources in a manner which does not benefit its citizens. To that end, he proposes what he calls a Clean Trade Policy, under which individual developed states would pass laws forbidding the trade in resources where minimum standards for resource exploitation and sale are not met. In our paper, we first develop Wenar’s proposal, and then ask if it is possible for it to come to fruition. We theorize how activists interested in bringing about these changes might utilize the existing features of international law to adopt Wenar’s proposals. Beginning with Jessup’s theory of transnational law as a method of understanding the interaction of public, private, national and international legal regimes, and the process of norm creation and enforcement outside states, we argue that activists interested in taking up Wenar’s challenge to reform the ownership and distribution of global commodities would do well to move beyond Wenar’s narrow public law framework, and study the myriad forms of regulation and interactions that define the contemporary transformation of political sovereignty and rule-making under the conditions of globalization. We argue thatnonly by exploiting mechanisms of transnational lawmaking could the Clean Trade Policy be made law.