Publication

This report explores how emerging nations and their civil-society allies successfully upended some of the WTO rules governing the protection of intellectual property rights. Basically, the iconoclasts sought to establish a new normative order where 1) the right to health takes precedence over patent rights on essential medicines, and 2) public health-based trade in state-licensed generics becomes a legitimate instrument of health policy. As the report's authors describe, this change in values occurred in four stages – 1) the establishment of a liberal normative order (in economics); 2) a norm-based contestation of this order; 3) the de-legitimization of “divergent normative conceptions”; and 4) a reshaping of the idea of what is legitimate in the pharmaceutical trade.