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The existing international economic order has been heavily shaped by US power and the US has been a key driver of globalisation and neoliberal economic restructuring, prompting speculation about whether the rise of new developing country powers could rupture the current trajectory of neoliberal globalisation. This paper analyses the case of Brazil at the World Trade Organization (WTO), a core institution in global economic governance. In the last decade, Brazil successfully waged two landmark trade disputes against the US and EU and created a coalition of developing countries – the G20 – which brought an end to the dominance of the US and EU at the WTO and made their trade policies a central target of the Doha Round. Brazil's activism has been widely hailed as a major victory for developing countries. However, I argue that rather than challenging the neoliberal agenda of the WTO, Brazil has emerged as one of the most vocal advocates of free market globalisation and the push to expand and liberalise global markets. I show that Brazil's stance has been driven by the rise of its export-oriented agribusiness sector. This case demonstrates that business actors from the Global South are becoming significant new protagonists in global economic governance; they are taking the tools created by the states and corporations of the Global North – in this case, the WTO and its neoliberal discourse – and turning them against their originators. At the same time, their interests are being wrapped in and advanced through a discourse of development and social justice and a strategic mobilisation of the politics of the North-South divide

The much hyped rise of the "BRICS" (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) has lately been met with equally fervent declarations of their demise. Amid slowing growth in many of these countries, the prevailing view now appears to be that the rise of the BRICS was little more than an illusion. In this article, however, I contest this assessment by arguing that the emerging powers were never solely, nor most importantly, merely an economic phenomenon. Instead, I show that emerging powers -specifically Brazil, India and China -have become an important political force in the global trading system and had a profound and lasting impact on the World Trade Organization (WTO). Contrary to the widespread assumption that these countries are too diverse to ally, I argue that the emerging powers displayed a remarkable degree of unity and cooperation, working in close concert to successfully challenge the dominance of the US and other established powers. As evidenced by the collapse of the Doha Round, the collective rise of Brazil, India and China substantially disrupted the functioning of one of the core institutions of the liberal economic order created under US hegemony.

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President Trump is widely seen as reversing 70 years of US trade policy and abdicating the American hegemon's traditional leadership role in the multilateral trading system. Trump has threatened to withdraw the US from the WTO, abandoned trade multilateralism for aggressive unilateralism, and jeopardised the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism by blocking appointments to its Appellate Body. As this article shows, however, both the crisis in the multilateral trading system and the American hegemon's turn away from the WTOincluding abandoning multilateral trade negotiations and blocking Appellate Body appointmentsoriginated prior to Trump. This shift in the US orientation towards the multilateral trading system cannot, therefore, solely be attributed to the rise of populism under Trump. It is also a reaction to the decline of the US's institutional powerits power over the core institution and rules governing trade. Amid the rise of China and other emerging powers, the US's ability to dominate global trade governance and write the rules of global trade sharply diminished, leading to an erosion of American support for the multilateral trading system it once led. While realism has fallen out of favour in IPE, understanding recent dynamics in the trading system requires revisiting its core insights.

Brazil has emerged as an agro-export powerhouse: from being a net-agricultural importer and food aid recipient as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, it has now become the world's third largest agricultural exporter, after the US and EU. What is more, Brazil's new role as a major agricultural trader has provided an important foundation for its enhanced status and influence in global economic governance, as an emerging power and one of the BRICS. This paper analyzes how such a remarkable transformation was brought about. I argue that Brazil's emergence as an agricultural powerhouse was the result not of its natural factor endowments, but extensive intervention on the part of the Brazilian state that had the effect of constructing a new comparative advantage. This transformation was propelled by state-driven innovation and related policies that opened up massive new areas of the country to agriculture, enabled it to shift to producing goods in direct competition with the world's dominant agricultural exporters, and generated significant gains in productivity and competitiveness. The irony is that the intention of these policies, initiated in the 1970s, was to foster industrial development in Brazil as part of its import-substitution industrialization program, yet they wound up having precisely the opposite effect -transforming Brazil into one of the world's dominant agricultural powers.

This is a post-print version of an article published in Critical Perspectives on International Business 10(4):291-309. (Special issue on Brazilian Corporations and the State.

The existing liberal international economic order was constructed during the era of American hegemony and has been heavily shaped by US power. How is the rise of China affecting global economic governance? This article analyzes the case of export credit, which has long been considered a highly effective international regulatory regime and an important component of global trade governance. I show that the rise of China is profoundly altering the landscape of export credit and undermining its governance arrangements. State-backed export credit is a key tool of China's development strategy, yet I argue that an explosion in China's use of export credit is eroding the efficacy of existing international rules intended to prevent a competitive spiral of state subsidization via export credit. The case of export credit highlights a fundamental tension between liberal institutions of global governance and the development objectives of emerging powers.