This group analyzes a topic central to the current process of capitalist accumulation: the global rules that allow transnational corporations to operate freely within the context of economic globalization. The group aims to analyze the phenomenon of the so-called Lex Mercatoria from a multidisciplinary perspective, incorporating viewpoints from law, sociology, international political economy, international relations, political science, political ecology, and feminist economics.

The concept of Lex Mercatoria has rapidly gained ground in the debate within the legal and social sciences. Its renewed centrality has been largely driven by the increasing expansion of regulatory frameworks for international trade and those aimed at attracting and protecting foreign investment. Furthermore, scholarly attention to the Lex Mercatoria has been renewed by the evidence of the complex relationship between the "code of global capital" (Pistor, 2019) or the "global economic constitution" (Fernández Ortiz de Zárate, 2018), and the mechanisms for regulating and guaranteeing human rights, particularly social rights, at the state and international levels. This occurs within a striking normative asymmetry that protects the rights of transnational corporations while simultaneously diluting their obligations (Hernández Zubizarreta and Ramiro, 2015). While international treaties obligate states to provide legal certainty and facilitate the circulation of global capital, corporations, as the embodiment of the most concentrated capital, bear no obligations or responsibilities within the international legal framework.

This concern about the far-reaching effects of Lex Mercatoria on human rights is not new. Various general comments from United Nations human rights bodies have emphasized that states cannot ignore their obligations regarding these rights when adopting bilateral and multilateral trade and investment agreements. Phrases such as "trade liberalization agreements should not restrict or undermine a country's capacity to guarantee the full exercise of the right to water" have become a standard clause also with respect to other rights such as social security or health (Guamán, 2016; Echaide, 2017). Specifically, as De Schutter (2019) has pointed out, the Human Rights Council has regularly called upon states to prepare a report on the human rights impact of the trade and investment agreements they conclude.

Latin American countries have embraced the logic of Lex Mercatoria through the signing of numerous Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs). The surge in the signing of these treaties occurred in the 1990s, within the framework established by the new rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). By mid-2022, there were 2.400 BITs in force and 320 treaties with investment provisions in effect (primarily FTAs). In Latin America, within a few years, Argentina had signed 55 BITs, Chile 48, Ecuador 30, Peru 26, Panama 22, Guatemala 17, Costa Rica 14, and Mexico 11. Brazil signed 16 BITs but did not ratify any. On the other hand, in January 1994, the first major free trade agreement (FTA) came into effect: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), whose format was copied in the trade agreement with Central America (DR-CAFTA), and the bilateral agreements with Peru, Chile, and Colombia. By the early years of the new century, Chile had become the country with the most FTAs ​​in the world; today it has 23 treaties that liberalize trade with 65 countries.

Free trade agreements (FTAs) are based on a number of myths associated with liberal economics. One of the biggest myths is that free markets and free enterprise, the famous laissez-faire approach, brings general freedom and well-being (Cajas-Guijarro, 2018). This myth is based on an economic theory that posits that everything works better when left to the sole laws of the market. "Open economies" would activate a virtuous cycle: liberalization and the promotion of trade and investment would lead to global economic integration, which would lead to economic development, which in turn would generate poverty reduction. The trend toward integrated global markets was perceived from the 1980s onward as having great potential for increased growth, constituting an opportunity for less industrialized (such as those in Latin America) and post-communist countries to raise their living standards.

Despite the push to sign trade agreements, several studies have shown little evidence that free trade policies (insofar as they reduce tariffs and non-tariff barriers) have directly led to economic growth (Rodríguez and Rodrik, 2001), nor can it be argued that signing BITs has directly caused increased investment flows to signatory countries (CAITISA, 2017). In fact, in Latin America, FTAs ​​have tended to reinforce primary-export models, as they have entrenched the characteristics of economies dependent on natural resource extraction (Ghiotto, 2021). These resources are mostly exported without value being added in Latin American countries. This primary-extractive model, in turn, is based on the ruthless exploitation of nature (Acosta, 2018).

The entry of Latin American countries into the sphere of Lex Mercatoria generated a vast number of commitments that tended to reduce state capacities (Pascual, 2020). Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) incorporate all the issues known as "trade-related," such as intellectual property rights, services, financial services, e-commerce, telecommunications, public procurement, investments, and regulatory coherence, among others. Thus, the implementation of an FTA impacts the revenue-generating capacity of states (because import tariffs, which are taxes, are reduced), but it also impacts people's daily lives because, for example, it drives up the prices of medicines (both for individual purchase and government procurement) by strengthening and extending intellectual property rights and hindering the production of generics, while simultaneously increasing the cost of and tending to privatize basic services (such as drinking water, electricity, education, and healthcare).

Furthermore, the signing of these treaties implied the acceptance by the States of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which has promoted the creation of a justice system parallel to the national justice system (Olivet and Ghiotto, 2021). This mechanism has already facilitated more than 320 investor claims against Latin American States, primarily from the extractive sector, for measures taken by the States that modified in some way the profit expectations of companies or affected property rights (Bárcena, Ghiotto, Müller, and Olivet, 2020).

In short, the Lex Mercatoria, expressed in the multiplicity of FTAs ​​and BITs, has pushed the commodification of all aspects of life, turning business rights into international rules above human rights.

This Working Group presents a critical perspective on International Political Economy (IPE). Within IPE, we consider not only economic studies, but also legal studies, political science, feminist perspectives, and political ecology, to construct an interpretive framework that accounts for the various facets of Lex Mercatoria. Institutionalizing a field of study that analyzes Lex Mercatoria from these complementary perspectives is essential to advancing analyses of the global economic constitution, with a particular focus on understanding its impacts on the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Traditional International Political Economy (IPE), whether rooted in realism or liberalism, treats the state and the market as separate entities, failing to identify an internal relationship between them. In this Working Group, we will attempt to move beyond this separation, understanding the internal relationships between the state and the market, and the Lex Mercatoria as a legal superstructure. Critical IPE thus understands the new international legal architecture as an expression of the conflicting relationships between economic and social forces (Hernández Zubizarreta and Ramiro, 2015; Guamán, 2016), which reveals the existence of antagonistic social relations (Pascual, 2020; Jaquenod, 2020). In this way, it is understood that the trade and investment treaties of the last thirty years reflect changes in the relationship between capital and labor, from the crisis of the so-called welfare states in the 1960s and 70s to the process of internationalization of capital known as "globalization." This process must therefore be understood within its historical context.

From the 1990s onward, new guarantees for capital have been expressed not only in national laws but also in a new international legal framework. The neoliberal, or "deregulated," world requires new regulations that guarantee the free movement of capital while simultaneously restricting the territorial availability of labor. This has had enormous social costs, such as waves of migration and the feminization of employment in maquiladoras and export-oriented production zones (Costantino and Laterra, 2020). This is far removed from the concept of decent work promoted by the International Labour Organization and global trade unionism.

One working hypothesis of this Group is that trade and investment treaties primarily aim to eliminate uncertainty for capital. These treaties grant a number of guarantees to foreign capital, with property rights at the forefront. The new international legal framework, in the form of free trade agreements (FTAs) and bilateral investment treaties (BITs), thus attempts to negate the uncertainty produced by the inherently unstable nature of capital's social relations. However, this instability, manifested in crises, is inherent to the capital-labor relationship.

This means that the legal superstructure cannot be understood (solely) as a result of the interstate struggle for greater power on a global scale, nor as a result of pressure from transnational corporations. Law is essential for regulating disputes in commodity-producing societies, because precisely without disputes, law would be unnecessary (Pashukanis in Mielville, 2005). The prerequisite for law in capitalist society is the separation of the producer from the means of production and subsistence, which Marx describes in Chapter XXIV of Volume I of Capital, on primitive accumulation. Without generalized exchange, without the constitution of peasants as a labor force, as free workers, there is no universal law, no freedom, and no equality. Therefore, the legal form must logically derive from the commodity form. From this, a second hypothesis can be derived: the Lex Mercatoria derives from, and gives rise to, new forms of relationship between capital and labor mediated by the State.

A critique of the EPI that examines the constitution of global rules, what is academically known as trade and investment governance (Saguier and Ghiotto, 2018), must establish a conceptual framework that accounts for how the capital-labor relationship manifests itself within and outside the state. Externally, this manifests in the commitments that states sign, limiting their capacity for regulatory action (whether monetary, labor, or public service management policies, etc.) at the domestic level; internally, it examines how these limitations on regulatory policy have a direct impact on the state's capacity to satisfactorily manage (from the perspective of capital reproduction) class relations within its territory.

This Group then proposes two specific lines of intervention:

- The constitution of an academic and intellectual group of critical EPI that collaborates to build an analytical framework for the understanding of the Lex Mercatoria and its impacts, with special emphasis on Latin America and the Caribbean;

- The construction of interpretive frameworks that allow us to understand the restriction on public policy generated by the Lex Mercatoria in its form of trade and investment treaties, and how this has impacted changes in state capacities.