Outside the conventional scope of national security, States characterize a plethora of issues as security concerns in present-day international affairs. While the securitization of unconventional issues has been studied extensively in relation to national security exceptions under economic treaties, States’ use of unconventional security claims in invoking public policy exceptions, where the legal text contains no security-related terms, has attracted less academic attention. This article investigates the WTO judiciary’s approach to unconventional security claims raised under the GATT/GATS general exceptions, focusing on energy security as a case study. It demonstrates how the WTO judiciary has used two ‘old’ legal techniques from well-established general exceptions jurisprudence to examine ‘new’ energy security claims: framing regulatory objectives and identifying origin-based discriminations. The article finds that the WTO judiciary tends to be more permissive with energy security claims that are more closely related to the conventional, defence-oriented security notion; claims that are more distant from the conventional conception are also given substantial regard, but subject to more cautious scrutiny.

This paper contributes to the discussion on the link between international trade policy and food and nutrition security by looking at whether and how these concepts are addressed in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). We compile a dataset covering almost 600 PTAs that entered into force between 1948 and 2024, and apply textual analysis to show that the number of references to food security has increased over recent decades. To analyse the role of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) in shaping the rules and practices of international food trade, we investigate the placement, function, and significance of food security provisions in four case studies, looking at the extent to which the regulatory approaches of these PTAs align with or diverge from the relevant provisions of the WTO AoA. Our study reveals that, despite the growing prominence of food security and nutrition in PTAs, their regulatory approaches largely align with the AoA and seldom overcome its shortcomings. While some agreements introduce broader and more contemporary understandings of food security, binding commitments remain limited and structural tensions between national and global objectives persist.

Are people who are more knowledgeable and interested in trade policy more likely to change their preferences regarding trade agreements compared to their less knowledgeable and less interested counterparts on receiving new information from politicians? This study responds to this question by developing a framework that distinguishes knowledge from interest and assesses it using an original survey conducted on voters during the 2020 US election campaign. Assessing whether information about trade agreements provided by political elites shifts individuals’ trade preferences and whether knowledge and interest condition susceptibility to such information reveals that people knowledgeable and interested in trade policy are less likely to change their original preference. Together, the results sharpen the existing theories by establishing knowledge and interest as moderators of trade opinion change in low-salience trade settings.

This paper introduces the Granular Trade and Production Activities (GRANTPA) database, which covers international trade flows for 3,124 products and 247 countries over the period 1995–2019 as well as domestic trade flows and production data for the same number of products and years for a subset of 35 European economies. The original data sources that we employ are Eurostat’s Comext and Prodcom databases. A gravity application delivers a large set of product-level ‘home bias’ estimates, which cannot be obtained without domestic trade flows. The average estimates on the standard gravity variables in our model (e.g., distance) are comparable to those from the related literature. However, our disaggregated estimates are very heterogeneous across products, thus highlighting the importance of our new database.

A large body of literature examines the drivers of individual attitudes towards international trade policies. This article contributes to this literature by exploring the role of border regions across the European Union (EU). Border regions offer a unique context for examining trade attitudes. Residency in either EU, non-EU, or maritime borders generates differential impacts on individuals’ support for distinct trade policies. Focusing on attitudes towards import duties and EU trade agreements, this article demonstrates that individuals in non-EU borderlands and maritime border regions are particularly supportive of lowering import duties, whereas support for extra-EU trade agreements is largely uniform across regions, with only a modest positive tendency among maritime residents. Broader sentiment on trade shows limited regional differences, chiefly between EU-border and non-EU-border residents. Including a battery of control variables drawn from the literature, the article leverages individual-level data at the most fine-grained level available in the EU to explore these dynamics relying on several regression models. This article speaks to both the literature on trade attitudes and border studies by offering a conceptualization of borders that distinguishes between EU borders, non-EU borders, and maritime borders, each of which has distinct implications for individuals’ trade attitudes.

The EU–Mercosur agreement is one of the longest and most complex trade negotiations in modern economic diplomacy. Launched in 1999 and finally concluded in December 2024, it offers a unique lens through which to understand trade negotiations in an era of geopolitical uncertainty, domestic contestation, and multilateral fragmentation. Drawing on the authors’ direct experience in trade policy and negotiation, this article argues that the agreement was not delayed because technical solutions were unavailable, nor concluded because underlying conflicts disappeared. Rather, it moved forward when changing international conditions increased the political value of closure for both sides. Agricultural sensitivities, sustainability concerns, competitiveness debates, and Mercosur’s internal coordination challenges remained. What changed was the cost of failing to reach an agreement. The case suggests that trade agreements today are no longer merely instruments of market access; they also serve as tools of strategic positioning, regulatory reassurance, and geopolitical signaling. In this context, uncertainty can become not only a constraint, but also a catalyst for cooperation and agreement