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This article offers some reflections on how multiple times are entangled in the current moment of living on a planet pushed beyond its limits and the way in which the present instability provides the basis not for radical action but for continued speculation and value creation. Promising to turn living whales into assets, the whale bond – an idea towards which various some private actors have quietly been working for some years – is one of the many strange products of the current speculative delirium. Bringing together insights from maritime environmental science, political economy, and literature, this Perspective reflects on the different times embodied in whales as commodity/asset as a device to highlight the fallacy of putting our hopes for escaping the current predicament on the subjugation of the living – and ‘ecosystem services’ more generally – into asset forms.

The classification codes granted by patent offices are useful instruments for simplifying the bewildering variety of patents in existence. They are singularly unhelpful, however, in locating a specific subgroup of patents such as that of drug-related pharmaceutical patents for which no classification codes exist. Taking advantage of advances in artificial intelligence and in natural language processing in particular, we offer a new method of identifying chemical drug-related patents in this article. The aim is primarily that of demonstrating how the proverbial needle in a haystack was identified, namely through leveraging the superb pattern-recognition abilities of the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) algorithm. We build three different databases to train our algorithm and fine-tune its abilities to identify the patent group in question by exposing it to additional texts containing structures that are much more likely to be present in them, until we obtain the highest possible F1-score, combined with an accuracy of 94.40%. We also demonstrate some possible uses of the algorithm. Its application to the US patent office database enables the identification of potential chemical drug patents up to ten years before drug approval, whereas its application to the German patent office reveals the regional nature of drug R&D and patenting strategies. The hope is that both the method proposed and its applications will be further refined and expanded forthwith.

• We ask how women are faring in the field of international trade both as knowledge producers and as policy-makers, with a focus on the former. This is an important question in light of the increased, if belated, attention paid to the gendered impact of international trade rules and of the gendered nature of academia.

• Using article publishing as a proxy for international trade scholarship, we create a unique dataset consisting of trade-related articles published in the 27 most influential journals in the field during the past 20 years.

• Examining the gender balance of authors in our database reveals that, despite recent progress, women's voices are still peripheral in the field, comprising just 31.5 percent of authors in the past five years.

• We find no reasons to believe this is a peculiarity of knowledge creation in the field of international trade. Rather, the analysis suggests that it is the highly gendered nature of the broad fields of International Relations and International Political Economy that explains the gender imbalance we find.

• Looking ahead, if we are serious about addressing gender imbalances in international trade policy-making and knowledge production, new knowledge and strategies are needed that address the structural reasons that contribute to the arbitrary but very real gender inequalities both in academia and policy-making. Ensuring women scholars and policy-makers are fully represented in formulating and implementing these strategies is a basic, even if insufficient, precondition for their success.

• Only after the weaknesses and hurdles are addressed will the deterrence and defence of the region attain a fully credible level.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic brought the proprietary pharmaceutical sector to the attention of the lay public, scholars had constructed a rich body of knowledge covering almost all of its aspects. But this diverse literature displays a tendency to focus on specific practices, often unarticulated with each other and detached from the broader socioeconomic-political context in which the sector operates. This article aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the radical transformations that have occurred in the sector in the context of the neoliberalisation-financialisation nexus. This vantage point enables us to grasp better the depth of these changes, especially the emergence of a new kind of corporation preoccupied predominantly with leveraging knowledge of two kinds: knowledge protected by state-backed legal (IP) titles, and that specific to orchestrating the various networks where most of research, development, and production now occurs.

This chapter is a political economy analysis of the current pharmaceutical patent system and its impact on access to medicines. We offer an historical perspective of the development of the international regulatory framework for patented drugs through the Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement in 1995. We go on to criticize the high international costs for patented drugs deriving from the TRIPS, and the results of creating access problem especially in low-middle income countries. He chapter analyses the pros and cons of patents. The chapter finally discusses the most recent attempts to modify the current policies in terms of alternative means for sustaining medical R&D, and other initiatives brought forwards within the WHO regarding the accessibility of patented drugs to low and middle-income countries.

Encouraged by the emergence of a new and growing literature on the use of trademark data as complementary indicators of innovation, this paper strengthens the case for such use by offering both qualitative and quantitative evidence in its support. Based on two large trademark and patent databases built for this purpose, the paper makes the argument that careful use of trademark data can improve our understanding of innovation processes across all sectors of the economy. Our databases generate a high correlation coefficient between patents and trademarks in four different scales of aggregation: firm, sector, country, and global. We argue that the combined use of patent and trademark data is better at capturing the whole gamut of innovation that takes place in the economy than the standard patent data alone. We embed our argument and analysis throughout in the main structural changes that have occurred in the global economy since the latter part of the twentieth century. We find that in certain cases, e.g. in service sectors, in sectors where patents are not widely used, and in the case of exporting entities from developing countries, trademark data are better at capturing the extent of technological and non-technological innovation that occurs therein.

Adopting an international political economy perspective, this chapter offers an analysis of why private business actors have been historically successful in shaping the international patent system and in using this aspect of public policy to promote their commercial interests. Simultaneously focusing on business groups’ mobilisation, the role of states, and on the competitive pressures emanating from the dynamics of the global economy, alongside other structural factors, the chapter demonstrates how patent protection levels have expanded from the first international patent convention of the late 19th century, to the 1995 WTO TRIPS Agreement, and during the post-TRIPS period in which business actors simultaneously took on the role of “TRIPS’ guardians” and of “TRIPS Plus advocates”, unleashing in the process a new era of ratcheting intellectual property (IP) protection levels worldwide. Their success is visible in the impressive growth of the global IP markets today. The chapter concludes by arguing that if such ratcheting up continues, a tragedy of the anti-commons may ensue, leading to less investment and innovation on account of increased costs of knowledge as input, increased legal challenges and, more generally, diminished diffusion of knowledge and ideas.

The emergence of Farmers' Rights in international law is closely related to the “seed wars” at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) during the 1980s. Recognizing the plant innovations of farmers everywhere, these rights represented a countervailing measure against increasing pressures to protect commercial plant breeders' rights around the world. Nearly three decades later, the intellectual property rights of plant breeders, internationally recognized and legally binding, are stronger than ever, while Farmers' Rights are facing increasing threats from the continuing spread of industrial agriculture and biotechnologies. The present article seeks to make two contributions: first, embedding the emergence of Farmers' Rights in a historical analysis, it conceptualizes them not simply as a new category of rights, but as a specific manifestation of the conflictual entwinement of capitalism and plant genetic resources fomented in the geopolitical context of the 20th century. Second, focusing on India and Brazil, it analyses the different manner in which the state in both has played a crucial role in restricting the real freedoms of traditional farmers. While farmers' “interests” are routinely preyed upon to justify various policies, their overall effect promises to deepen the ongoing process of farmers' dispossession and separation from their basic means of production: the seed.