Global Good Process Standards and World Trade Law : A Study of Norms and Normativity in Global Law and Governance Perspective

World trade relations, law and policies (i), and voluntary sustainability standards (ii) influence each other. They also affect processes identified as ‘global governance’ (iii). These three themes constituted the major crossing point of interest of my doctoral research. In my PhD dissertation, the general aim was to not only describe the interface, practices, and various relevant occurrences of cross-border trade law and standards in the globalisation context, but also, and indeed especially, to critically assess them. The pivotal idea of my thesis was to include different kinds of global quasi-legal normativities into law, and to submit them to a more just and coherent legitimacy analysis. The abovementioned ambitions emerged because today, hybrid normativities in the global legal (dis)order simply escape most of more traditional approaches to law and legitimacy, which mainly draw on state sovereignty-related premises. The main normative message of the aforesaid ambitions is that law could and should be re-thought in a way that any kind of normativities with impressive global normative and regulatory force, yet with dubious social legitimacy, can be included in it exactly for the purposes of assessing their legitimacy vis-à-vis the global public