founded in 1994 at the close of the Uruguay
Round (1986–94) of the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks in
Marrakesh. Its purpose is to liberalize inter-
nationaltradeby enforcing free trade rules,
arbitrating international trade disputes, and
working to forge new global agreements on
the removal oftariffand so-called non-tariff
barriers to trade (the latter including all
sorts of national rules on health and environ-
mental protections). Unlike the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank –
which were set up at Bretton Woods to run on
a ‘one dollar, one vote’ principle – the WTO
operates on an ostensibly more inclusive
model, in which the voices of individual mem-
ber states are all meant to count. However,
because the ground rules for inclusion are
fixed as free trade rules, because the basic goal
of the organization is to remove frictions on
the movement ofcommodities, and because
the organization’s disputes resolution mechan-
ism works on the assumption that it is intrin-
sically good to reduce both tariff and non-tariff
barriers to trade, the WTO serves institution-
ally to expand and entrenchneo-liberalism
on a global scale (Peet, 2003; see alsoterms
of trade). Everywhere its rules apply, the
WTO enables theprivatizationof formerly
public goods and common property
resources, whether they be medicines, gov-
ernment-provided health services, shared
forests or cleanwater. As well as thereby
facilitating accumulation by dispossession
(Harvey, 2005: seeprimitive accumulation),
WTO rules also simultaneously undercut
democratic governance insofar as they provide
a powerful lever through which businesses can
reduce or eliminate democratic law-making
(including, for example, legislation banning
carcinogenic chemicals and pesticides) by
coding the resulting public interest laws as
non-tariff barriers to trade (Wallach and
Woodall, 2004). Another neo-liberal aspect
of the WTO is that there is no possibility under
its free trade rules to permit development strat-
egies that are not neo-liberal, such as state
assistance to new industries, that try to estab-
lish themselves in the face of competition from
developed producers elsewhere. As a result, the
WTO has been criticized for ‘kicking away the
ladder’ (Chang, 2002) for the world’s poorer
countries, preventing them from following a
path once taken by countries such as the USA
and Japan that used industrial protectionism in
their early approach todevelopment.Ithas
been this basic injustice, combined with
the WTO’sdemocracy-eroding complicity in
processes of dispossession, that has led so many
critics to take to the streets from Seattle in 1999
through to Hong Kong in 2006. Ironically,
however, it has been yet another injustice noted
by the protestors that has ultimately proved
most damaging to the WTO’s own attempts
to expand free trade since the ‘Battle in
Seattle’. This injustice is the disproportionate
powerstill wielded by the US government in
negotiations because of the importance of the
US market in global trade. The irony is that
because the USA has been unwilling to fully
implement free trade itself, and, most notably,
because (like the EU) it has been unwilling to
give up the huge subsidies given each year to
domestic farmers, US officials have been mov-
ing increasingly away from themultilateral-
ism of WTO negotiations, where they face
growing demands from developing countries
to eliminate such practices. As a result,
American trade negotiators have preferred
more recently to develop bilateral trade deals
with particular countries such as Singapore,
and, meanwhile, the WTO’s failing attempts
to expand free trade remain an important
reminder thatglobalizationis not so inevit-
able after all. msworld-systems analysis Amaterialistand
historical approach to the study of social change
developed by Immanuel Wallerstein (1979,
1984, 1991a). The approach builds upon three
research schools –dependency theory,the
annales schoolandmarxism(seehistorical
materialism) – to create a unidisciplinary and
holistic historical social science. The approach
was integral to the reinvigoration ofpolitical
geography in the 1980s and its usage in
geography is still largely restricted to this
sub-discipline (Flint and Shelley, 1996).
World-systems analysis runs counter to main-
stream social science in its definition of society.
Wallerstein begins by identifying three basic
modes of production, or ways of organizing
production and social reproduction. Therecipro-
cal-lineagemode describes asociety in which
production is organized around age andgender
differences and exchanges are reciprocated
within the group. The redistributive-tributary
mode occurs inclass-based societies in which
a large class of agricultural workers gives the
surplus of their production to elites. Thecapit-
alist mode of productionis also class based, but is
defined by ceaseless capital accumulation
motivated by themarket which sets prices
through the logic of supply and demand.
Wallerstein defines society by the spatial
extent of these modes of production, and notGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_W Final Proof page 813 31.3.2009 4:10pmWORLD-SYSTEMS ANALYSIS