ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way that power has been understood in the politics of North–South trade relations. It presents a critique of dominant understandings of power as compulsion and seeks instead to emphasise the relationship between power, legitimacy and institutions across a complex trade regime. In particular, it stresses the importance of contestation over legitimacy in North–South preferential trade negotiations, the outcomes of which are more conventionally thought to be shaped by the compulsory power that stems from material asymmetries.
