Since the 2008 economic meltdown, market-driven globalization has posed new challenges for governments. This collection introduces the innovative concept of “grey zones” of global governance, where international rules are bent or ignored. These zones are significant, contested spaces for state policy and market behaviour to interact with respect to trade, the environment, food security, and investment.

Powerful incentives exist in the global economy for states to harmonize their policies through trade and investment agreements. But grey zones both promote uniformity in many areas of public life and facilitate diverse forms of capitalism in market societies. They enable governments to balance national and global economic benefits as they advance their core interests.

At a time of growing nationalist sentiment, Grey Zones in International Economic Law and Global Governance explores creative local engagement with international economic law and offers a bold new way to understand public concerns about international trade and investment, food security, green energy, subsidies, and anti-dumping actions.

Daniel Drache is a leading expert on global trade governance and North American integration. He is the author of Borders Matter: Homeland Security and the Search for North America (2004), a revised edition of which was published in Spanish in 2007. The editor of a special edition of Canada Watch—“Deep Integration: North America Post-Bush”—he is also a member of the Centre for International Governance Innovations (CIGI) North American Portal advisory committee.

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Les Jacobs is professor of law and society and political science, and director of the Institute for Social Research at York University. He is also executive director of the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, the country’s leading pan-Canadian think tank devoted to access-to-justice issues, housed at Osgoode Hall Law School. He has held a range of distinguished visiting appointments at other universities, including Harvard Law School; the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies; the Law Commission of Canada; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Toronto; Emory University; and Waseda Law School, Tokyo. His many other books include Rights and Deprivation (1993); The Democratic Politics of Vision (1997); Pursuing Equal Opportunities (2004); Balancing Competing Human Rights in a Diverse Society (2012); and Linking Global Trade and Human Rights: New Policy Space in Hard Economic Times (2014).

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