From Diplomacy to Deadlock: Developing Countries and the Unfinished Legalisation of WTO Dispute Settlement

The move from GATT's diplomacy-oriented practice to the WTO's adjudicative system was meant to narrow the gap between weak and strong traders. This article asks whether it has. Drawing on the dispute record to 2000, later scholarship and the recent breakdown of appellate review, it avers that legalisation widened developing countries' access to enforcement but left three asymmetries largely intact: the cost of litigation, the unequal value of retaliation, and the declaratory character of special and differential treatment. Since December 2019, the paralysis of the Appellate Body has added a fourth. The article ends with reforms aimed at the position of developing members, not simply at restoring the status quo ante.