The WTO's First Antitrust Case - Mexican Telecom: A Sleeping Victory for Trade and Competition

A World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute panel has decided theWTO’s first antitrust case. It resolved the matter infavour of the United States’ claim that Mexico had anticompetitivelyfacilitated exploitative prices and a cartel that raised theprice of terminating cross-border telephone calls in Mexicoand thereby harmed trade and competition. The case is Mexico– Measures Affecting Telecommunications Services (April2004) (‘the Mexican telecom case’). This essay arguesthat if the WTO’s antitrust clause was in fact triggered(which is a point of contention), Mexico’s conduct violatedits obligations. Furthermore, it argues that the GATS antitrustobligation in the telecommunications sector should be acknowledgedas occupying an important place at the intersection of trade,competition and industrial policies. Antitrust law is the otherside of the coin of liberal trade law. Antitrust law opens marketsby prohibiting private and other commercial restraints, whiletrade law opens markets by prohibiting public restraints. BeforeMexican telecom, no legal discipline was regarded as copiousor flexible enough to address combined public and private restraints.In particular, nations were allowed free rein to privilege nationalchampions that harmed competition in and out of their country,imposing costs on outsiders as well as on their own people.A positive reading of the antitrust clause helps to fill thegap.     

Coercive Radicalization: Charismatic Authority and the Internal Strategies of ISIS and the Lord's Resistance Army

A framework for understanding Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)'s apocalyptic theology as an internal strategy to “coercively radicalize” its captive subjects is presented, by comparison to the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which shares key stages of captive indoctrination with ISIS. A violent experience of “entry,” religious rules learned in an “assimilation” process, and millenarian “grand narratives” framing violence as purification, are examined. These stages construct an image of group leaders as divinely endowed with spiritual knowledge and access (i.e., charismatic authority). This can create a sense of dependency on the leaders and their instructions, potentially motivating violent and altruistic behavior from initially unwilling subjects.