Struggles against Bilateral FTAs: Challenges for Transnational Global Justice Activism

The past decade has seen major movements and mobilizations against the newer crop of bilateral free trade and investment agreements being pursued by governments in the wake of the failure of global (World Trade Organization) and regional (e.g. Free Trade Area of the Americas) negotiations, and the defeat of an attempted Multilateral Agreement on Investment in the 1990s. However, in spite of much scholarly, non-governmental organization (NGO) and activist focus on transnational global justice activism, many of these movements, such as the major multi-sectoral popular struggle over the recently-concluded US-Korea Free Trade Agreement, are hardly acknowledged in North America and Europe. With a shift in emphasis pushing liberalization and deregulation of trade and investment increasingly favouring lower-profile bilateral agreements, this article maps the resistance movements to these latest shifts in global free market capitalist relations and it discusses the disconnect between these (mainly Southern) struggles and dominant scholarly and NGO conceptions of global justice and the global justice movement as well as questions of knowledge production arising from these movements.