Constructing landscapes of unfair trade: An examination of Section 301

Trade policy creates particular legal and policy landscapes, which subsequently influence further rounds of trade policy development. The most common approach to trade analysis has directed its attention toward outcomes and how or whether those outcomes affect trade flows of goods and services. What remains in the trade policy black box are the political and economic geographies constituting the landscapes (particularly the discursive landscapes or geographical imaginations) within which trade policy is constituted. This study examines a specific U.S. trade policy instrument overseen by the U.S. Trade Representative---the unfair trade statute, section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. Section 301 provides an avenue for firms, trade associations, and labor groups to assert that actions undertaken by foreign governments or businesses constitute "unfair" trade practices. Examination of the filings of section 301 petitions and prosecution of 301 cases reveals not only the construction of, but also the selling and judging of, the terrain of unfair trade.;A social and institutional analysis of §301 trade policy contrasts with traditional economic and geographic analyses of international trade because it raises fundamental questions regarding how the effects of trade inform policy development and it highlights the recursive social and institutional context of trade. The variables responsible for the production and enactment of §301 trade policy are not only the outcomes of trade flows or the geographies of the prosecuted cases. Section 301 trade policy produces and is produced by geoeconomic discourses of trade that tell stories of trade barriers, of economic opportunities and distress, of section 301 case successes and losses, and the promotion of particular forms or types of trading regimes.;Keywords. Geography and Trade, Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, Economic Geography, Geography and Law, Globalization...