ABSTRACT
Since the World Trade Organization (WTO) was constituted in the year 1995, there have been a constantly increasing number of critics and protests in reaction to the organization and its free trade agreements. One of the main free trade agreements of the WTO is the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). GATS has been strongly condemned by a broad variety of actors (social movements, trade unions, development non-government organizations [NGOs], local governments, public universities, etc.) because of the inclusion of education in its scope. The main criticism of this agreement is that it stipulates the application of regulations for free trade in the education sector-and all other services sectors (Fredriksson, 2004; Hill, 2006; Scherrer, 2007).1 The GATS also aims to promote the commercialization of educational services through successive rounds of negotiations (Verger, 2008). These negotiations take place on an international scale (basically, in spaces such as the WTO headquarters in Geneva or the WTO Ministerial Conferences). It means that, as we shall see, many of the struggles and other kind of reactions against WTO and GATS are of a similarly global nature. However, key decisions over the GATS are being taken at the state level (Vlk et al, 2008) and consequently, initiatives for resistance are also being also developed in local and national spaces.
