Abstracts
Abstract
The scholarship on trade linkages investigates how trade policy interacts with other policy spheres, such as security, environment, labor or human rights. Recently, this literature has turned towards examining the politics of what is considered to lie “inside” and “outside” of the trade governance arena. Our article offers an engagement with such questions of “trade linkages vs. trade disconnects” from a feminist political economy perspective. We critically analyze the linkages and disconnects between trade and gender, and trade and social reproduction, which is integrally related to the former, in the global trade policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We find that global trade policy-makers acknowledged the link between trade and gender during the Covid-19 pandemic and recognized how Covid-19 revealed the insecurities associated with women’s position in productive and reproductive labor. At the same time, our analysis reveals that the Covid-19 trade response also reproduced gender based-inequalities in global trade governance, including the false distinction between production and social reproduction, the privileging of the former above the latter, and the lack of challenges to existing trade rules or orthodoxies, which themselves fuel gender-based inequalities and crises in social reproduction. Overall, we conclude that long-standing disembeddedness and exclusions can be reproduced in the making of new trade linkages, unless the power relations that underpin global trade and global trade governance are actively identified and disturbed.
Keywords:
- trade,
- feminist political economy,
- trade linkages,
- Covid-19,
- trade and public health
Résumé
La littérature sur les liens du commerce étudie l'interaction entre la politique commerciale et d'autres domaines politiques, tels que la sécurité, l'environnement, le travail ou les droits humains. Récemment, ces travaux se sont intéressés aux enjeux politiques liés à ce qui est considéré comme relevant « de l'intérieur » et « de l'extérieur » de la gouvernance commerciale. Notre article propose une analyse de ces questions de « liens » versus « déconnexions » du commerce, dans une perspective d'économie politique féministe. Nous analysons de manière critique les liens et les déconnexions entre commerce et genre, ainsi qu'entre commerce et reproduction sociale (intimement liée au premier), dans le cadre des réponses de la politique commerciale mondiale à la pandémie de Covid-19. Nos résultats montrent que les décideurs politiques en matière de commerce international ont reconnu le lien entre commerce et genre durant la pandémie de Covid-19, et ont reconnu également comment la pandémie a mis en relief la précarité de la place des femmes dans le travail productif et reproductif. Dans le même temps, notre analyse révèle que les mesures commerciales prises face à la Covid-19 ont également reproduit les inégalités de genre dans la gouvernance du commerce mondial. Parmi celles-ci figurent la distinction fallacieuse entre production et reproduction sociale, la priorité accordée à la première au détriment de la seconde, et l'absence de remise en question des règles et des pratiques commerciales établies, qui alimentent précisément ces inégalités et les crises de la reproduction sociale. En conclusion, nous estimons que les formes d'exclusion et de marginalisation profondément ancrées dans la société peuvent se reproduire lors de la création de nouveaux liens de commerce, à moins que les rapports de pouvoir qui sous-tendent le commerce mondial et sa gouvernance ne soient activement identifiés et bouleversés.
Mots-clés :
- commerce international,
- économie politique féministe,
- liens du commerce,
- Covid-19,
- commerce et santé publique
Appendices
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