Fabian Bohnenberger

After three and a half years of intense work, I am very happy that I submitted my PhD dissertation at King’s College London. It took a bit longer than expected but the circumstances over the last year made this unavoidable. It is great that the thesis is finally done, although I am the first to admit that there are a few things that could still be improved. This feeling, I have been assured, is entirely normal. As one friend wisely put it: when can you ever claim to have thought something through in its entirety?

In any case, there always comes a point where you have to let go and this point was probably already overdue. PhD students often hear the saying: “A good dissertation is a done dissertation. A great dissertation is a published dissertation. A perfect dissertation is neither.” Like many others, I noted down this mantra early on only to realise later that living by it is much harder than it sounds.

So, I submitted my PhD dissertation titled “Giving Life to the Agreements: Everyday Practices of Stability and Change in the World Trade Organization” on 17 May 2021. Now it is up to my examiners, who will have the opportunity to grill me about my research and its value in a few weeks. I’m looking forward to it.

Because I can’t just leave you here with only the title, let me quickly point out three contributions that my thesis makes. One relates to theory, one to trade policy making, and one to research methods.

First, in terms of theory, my thesis makes the argument that international institutions are maintained and eventually transformed much more dynamically than many scholars realise and most existing theories allow. To show these gradual processes of stability and change, my research focuses on everyday practices – broadly construed as socially organised ways of doing things – and the evolution of these practices within specific institutional contexts (like the WTO committees) over time. This approach adds dynamism to existing explanations of institutional persistence and transformation. In short, I show how processes of institutional stability and change are much more intertwined than conventionally assumed, and how this institutional metastability can be analytically captured in the continuous emergence and contestation of (diplomatic and regulatory) practices.

Second, my thesis shifts attention to a part of trade governance that rarely captures the attention of scholars or the public: the seemingly mundane “regular work” within the WTO. Broadly, this refers to the many implementation and monitoring activities that unfold in the large infrastructure of WTO councils and committees. The committee meetings allow the WTO members to address implementation problems, resolve disagreements, and even to elaborate on the existing WTO agreements. But these exchanges are clearly not always successful at resolving the perceived problems. I study how the committee debates evolved over time, what practices developed to guide this regular work, and what the committees’ significance in trade policy making really is.

Third, in terms of methods, my thesis innovates by combining the traditional tools of practice scholars (like interviews and ethnographic participant observation) with quantitative methods. To produce a picture of multilateral trade diplomacy within the WTO that is much more comprehensive than previous accounts, I conduct a quantitative text analysis of the minutes documents of 23 WTO bodies from 1995 to 2017. This produces new insights into patterns and shifts in members’ participation in the regular work over time. It also adds some pretty figures.

By developing a practice-oriented theoretical framework, highlighting an under-explored area of WTO governance, and introducing a new data gathering approach, I hope to make some lasting contributions to the literature. This reflects another saying that I recently came across. The standard answer of biographer Robert A. Caro to questions about his next book usually is: “It doesn’t matter how long a book takes. What matters is how long a book lasts.” I (and everyone at King’s) clearly was too impatient to commit to Caro’s average publishing schedule of one book per decade. But then again, I don’t write thousand page epics like Caro, and my thesis is still far from being published.

I will be working hard towards making the thesis more accessible – who wants to read 300 densely written pages, after all? Don’t envy my examiners too much. My plan is to break my findings down into a few shorter papers in order to highlight the academic and policy arguments more clearly. The first research article has already been accepted by the Review of International Political Economy (RIPE).

And by the way, the whole submission process is much less exciting than it sounds. While it probably never felt that dramatic to heave a few kilos of paper onto a library desk, the pandemic has reduced the submission process to clicking “send” on an email. Rather anticlimactic, but it is saving a few trees. Let’s see what the viva has in store.