Normative Conflict by Design - The Future of the Law of Exceptions in the WTO

Description

This talk examines the exceptions in WTO agreements as an architecture for managing normative conflict. It shows how general, security and economic-integration exceptions accommodate conflicting values and different tensions between trade commitments, regulatory autonomy, essential State interests and differentiated integration. These provisions adopt distinct standards of justification and judicial scrutiny, reflecting historical choices, varying importance of values and institutional sensitivities at stake. Recent disputes nevertheless reveal increasingly porous boundaries, particularly as industrial policy is ‘moralised’ or ‘securitised’ and concepts such as resilience, strategic autonomy and economic security expand. This concurrent moralization and securitization of economic policy stretches teh limits of exceptions and complicates WTO judicial review. The talk asks whether WTO law still has the necessary tools to structure these conflicts through justification, good faith and institutional restraint rather than allowing them to become exercises of unilateral power.

Period	4 Sept 2026
Event title	ESIL 2026 Annual Conference - International Law and Conflict: An Enduring Tension?
Event type	Conference
Location	Malaga, SpainShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International