Abstract
Abstract
Decolonising Geographical Indications
The encouragement grant proposal seeks to elevate the underlying PhD research project titled 'Geographical Indications and Sustainable Development – Preparing GIs for the Future' by integrating the concept of decolonisation of GI law in the theoretical and the empirical part of the project. To facilitate this integration, a research stay at the University of Cape Town, South Africa under the supervision of Professor Caroline Ncube is proposed.
The PhD research places a special focus on GI law and governance in developing countries and it is important for the research to be open to a broad spectrum of ideas on origin linked products. Curiously, all literature on the history of geographical indications law traced its origins to the laws on appellations of origins in 19th century France. While it is easy to find domestic rationales and debates from France and neighbouring European countries in the early 19th century when European law on GIs was being negotiated and it is not difficult to trace the position of other Global North countries such as Switzerland and the U.S. during the negotiations for the TRIPS Agreement. However, the participation of developing countries during these debates was conspicuously absent and even today, the domestic rationales of countries in the Global South are dictated more by the requirement of complying with the WTO TRIPS agreement and any other bilateral trade agreements that they may have signed, than by the socio-economic needs or demands of producers of origin-linked goods. When one inspects the general corpus of international intellectual property law, it becomes clear that these laws were drafted primarily by European countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries (the Paris and the Berne Conventions) and later on included in an international agreement (TRIPS Agreement 1994). The conditions of world trade in this time were heavily in favour of European imperial powers and intellectual property law contains traces of coloniality till date.
The present research proposal seeks to elevate the underlying research proposal by including insights from decolonisation literature (Haraway 1988; Quijano 2007; Bhambra 2014; Moosavi 2020). Decolonisation literature adds strength to the already existing push for bottom-up governance approaches which restores the decision-making power to the lowest levels of producers in the GI value chain. More concretely this forces governments and policy makers to ask the questions- Whose development? Who decides whether a product should be protected through a GI? Who draws the boundaries? Who receives the compensation for infringements? It refocuses the attention to the terroir, which includes not only the physical characteristics of the land but also the human link to the origin. GI law's ability to valorize and effectively protect the terroir of GI products can be the key to its sustainability and to the sustainable development of the region. At the end of the research stay, the written output in addition to the PhD research will be an open access article. The initial ideas for this research have already been presented at international conferences: IPIRA Conference 2021 and the Annual EPIP Conference 2021. Another impact of this research will be a contribution to the discussion on decolonisation of law with the example of decolonisation of GI law at the Faculty of Law, University of Antwerp.
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