Notes on the authorPeg Murray-Evans is a Teaching Fellow at the University of York. Her research focuses on the role of ideas and institutions in the politics of international trade and development, with particular reference to the European UnionÕs relations with developing countries and trade and development politics in Southern Africa. In 2012, she spent a three-month period as a visiting researcher at the University of Cape Town and she has conducted field research in South Africa and Botswana, and at the European Commission in Brussels. First, I argue for a clear separation between ontological claims about the structure-agency relationship and empirical questions about the preferences, strategies and influence of African actors. Second, I suggest that in order to understand the regional dynamics of African agency it is important to pay close attention to the diversity and contingency of African preferences and to the role of both power politics and rhetorical contestation in regional political processes.
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The following article offers a critical engagement with recent economic constructivist scholarship as a means of understanding the nature of the European Union's 'market power'. It does so by focusing on the African, Caribbean and Pacific group of countries, and seeks to explain why -in spite of the European Union's preponderant market powerthe goal of promoting trade liberalisation and regulatory harmonisation through regional Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) ultimately fell short of original ambitions. We highlight the inadequacies of materialist accounts of the European Union's market power in this case and instead take our cue from the (predominantly) constructivist literature emphasising the role of transnational advocacy coalitions. We argue, however, that the latter do not go far enough in their exploration of the non-material correlates of the European Union's market power by considering fully its discursive dimension. To address this shortcoming, we draw on Craig Parsons' distinction between ideational and institutional logics of explanation to understand how the invocation of institutional constraints affects the impact of particular discursive strategies. We argue that, in our specific case, the success or failure of the Economic Partnership Agreements rested not
This article critically interrogates claims that a British exit from the European Union (Brexit) will create opportunities for the UK to escape the EUÕs apparent protectionism and cumbersome internal politics in order to pursue a more liberal and globalist trade agenda based on the Commonwealth. Taking a historical view of UK and EU trade relations with the Commonwealth in Africa, I highlight the way in which the incorporation of the majority of Commonwealth states into the EU's preferential trading relationships has reconfigured ties between the UK and its former colonies over time. Further, I suggest that the EUÕs recent attempts to realise a vision for an ambitious set of free trade agreements in Africa Ð the Economic Partnership Agreements Ð was disrupted not by EU protectionism or internal politics but rather by African resistance to the EUÕs liberal agenda for reciprocal tariff liberalisation and regulatory harmonisation. The UK therefore faces a complex challenge if it is to disentangle its trade relations with Africa from those of the EU and to forge its own set of ambitious free trade agreements with African partners.
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