Introduction: Beyond Free Trade

This book comes at a time when scarcely a day passes that major news outlets do not carry some coverage of free trade deals being negotiated and signed around the world. Unlike five or ten years ago, that coverage now arrives to many of us through a number of social media platforms. Weaving together the narrative of the journalist with that of the social commentator, the activist with that of the NGO, the policy maker with that of the social movement participant, such coverage and analysis reveal a complicated, power-laden, and contested landscape. Upon its terrain, critical observers pursue distinct ‘wars of position’ (Gramsci 1971), in order to destabilize monolithic techno-representations of free trade as common sense, good-for-all, strategies to support human development. As this introduction was being written, the following headline appeared in our Facebook newsfeeds: ‘The truth behind the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership’ (TTIP), directing the observer to the Sierra Club’s US website where the organization describes negotiations for the TTIP between the United States and European Union as ‘cloaked in secrecy’ and ‘dominated by corporations’, threatening, if approved, to ‘put corporate rights on steroids’, to ‘open the floodgates for fossil fuel exports and fracking’, and to ‘revise law-making in favour of corporations’ (Sierra Club 2014).