This workshop provides an opportunity for the 2nd and 3rd year researchers under the supervision of prof. Sergio Puig to present their ongoing work and engage more closely with each other’s research.
The presentations gather a wide array of different topics from the field of international economic law, and we warmly invite all interested participants to join and enrich the discussions. Each presenter will have half an hour at their disposal, approximately composed of a 15-minute presentation and a 15-minute discussion.
- Tim Ellemann: Trade Sorting Machines: Bordering the EU through the European law of economic security
In his thesis, Tim re-interprets the emerging economic security instruments of the EU as legal mechanisms that determine with increasing precision and ambition what may enter the EU's economic space, on what terms, from whom, and what may not leave it. Taken together, they constitute something that existing legal scholarship has not yet adequately theorised: a regime through which the EU is actively producing its own economic borders rather than merely managing flows across borders that already exist.
- Tereza Kanova: Civil Society Participation in the EU Revisited: A View from Trade and Sustainable Development Policy
In her project, Tereza seeks to explore the mechanisms for civil society participation in the field of Trade and Sustainable Development and how labour actors in particular employ them to advance their objectives. Her starting point is a (re-)conceptualization of civil society in the EU, as well as of the EU’s Trade and Sustainable Development policy, which is also the main focus of her presentation.
- Alexandre Lejeune: The Law and Politics of Bilateral Trade Committees of the European Union
This project analyses the activities of EU bilateral trade committees from the point of view of EU and international law. It describes their functions as regulatory forums and dispute-resolution organs.
- Bénédicte Meille: Drawn but Not Loosed: The Arc of Choice, Experimentalism, and the WTO TFA’s Dodged Learning
The WTO Agreement on Trade Facilitation (TFA), concluded in 2014, represented a landmark departure from reciprocity in multilateral trade law: for the first time, developing and least-developed countries were granted differentiated rights over the pace and conditionality of their obligations. This paper examines the legal technology that operationalises this departure — the Arc of Choice — through the lens of experimentalist governance. It identifies two hypothesized design defects that structurally impede developing countries from realizing the Arc of Choice’s full benefits, and tests these hypotheses through a West Africa case study. The findings suggest that the TFA’s model of differentiated fairness, while conceptually innovative, contains recursive learning failures that constrain its transformative potential — with cross-regime implications for how fairer alliance-building can be designed around coherent integration trajectories and shared values.
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