EJIL: The Podcast! Episode 41: Thinking through Rupture in International Economic Law: Views from Latin America

In January 2026, the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, gave a widely noted speech at the World Economic Forum, in which he described the current period we’re living through as a rupture in the world order. How should we be thinking about rupture – and continuity – in relation to the contemporary international economic order? What is happening to international law, the purposes to which it is being put, its centrality as a technology of governing over distance, its status as a carrier for aspirations to multilateralism and universalism? Are we in fact living through a period of rupture or merely the loss of faith of a hegemon in its own international legal tools? This episode tackles these questions, and more, focusing particularly on how Latin America is experiencing and reacting to this moment of crisis – or, perhaps, of opportunity. Andrew Lang (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) is joined by Michelle Ratton Sanchez Badin (FGV Sao Paulo School of Law, Brazil) and Nicolás M. Perrone (Universidad de Valparaiso, Chile).

A separate short audio file captures the guests’ recommendations for reading/viewing materials.

Scholarship referred to in the episode includes:

• J.H.H. Weiler, ‘The Rule of Lawyers and the Ethos of Diplomats: Reflections on the Internal and External Legitimacy of WTO Dispute Settlement’ (2001) 35 Journal of World Trade 191
• Fabio Morosini and Michelle Ratton Sanchez Badin (eds), Reconceptualizing International Investment Law from the Global South (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
• Michelle Ratton Sanchez Badin, ‘International Economic Law by Other Means: A Three-Level Matrix of Chinese Investments in Brazil’s Electric Power Sector’ (2021) 62 Harvard International Law Journal 105-36
• Benjamin Allen Coates, Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2016)
• Nicolás M. Perrone and David Schneiderman, ‘International economic law’s wreckage: depoliticization, inequality, precarity’ in Emilios Christodoulidis, Ruth Dukes and Marco Goldoni (eds) Research Handbook on Critical Legal Theory (Edward Elgar, 2019) 446-472 (ch 24)
• Matias Spektor, ‘The Global South Pushes Back’, New York Times, Jan. 11, 2026 
• Albert O. Hirschman, ‘Political Economics and Possibilism’ in Jeremy Adelman, Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen (eds), The Essential Hirschman (Princeton University Press, 2013) 1–34
• Tullo Vigevani and Gabriel Cepaluni, ‘Lula’s foreign policy and the quest for autonomy through diversification’ (2007) 28 Third World Quarterly 1309
• The Falling Sky [La Chute du Ciel / A Queda do Céu] (2024), https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32128962/ 
• Amrita Narlikar, Poverty Narratives and Power Paradoxes in International Trade Negotiations and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
• José Miguel Ahumada and Ha-Joon Chang, ‘A new international economic order for the twenty-first century: an agenda for industrial and trade policies from the Global South’ (2025) 13 Review of Keynesian Economics 562–580