Introduction: Emerging Powers and the wto

Abstract

International trade has become increasingly important to emerging market economies. Concurrently, increasing trade liberalization through the multilateral Doha Round, launched in November 2001, from the World Trade Organization (wto) has been a failure. The essays in this issue evaluate the role of Brazil, China, and India at thewtoexamining in particular their domestic and coalitional constraints, the fairness and justice claims underlying their interests, and the types of identity politics that inform their negotiation positions. These three facets do not make multilateral negotiations easy but they do offer possibilities for future negotiations. Multilateral trade negotiations may not decline but the current era of ‘managed multilateralism’ has become complex balancing great and emerging powers interests.