Minilateralism

Chris Brummer is Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, C. Boyden Gray Fellow on Growth and Finance at the Atlantic Council, and Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute. Professor Brummer lectures widely on finance and global governance, and has taught or visited at the University of Basel, the University of Heidelberg, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Soft Law and the Global Financial System (2012).

• Introduction: rethinking cooperation in a multipolar world; 1. Multilateralism's rise and fall; 2. Playing the numbers in trade; 3. Soft law in international finance; 4. Hedging bets in the monetary system; 5. Managing minilateralism.

'Chris Brummer's core message is that multilateralism is giving way to minilateralism. As the era of American hegemony draws to a close and as the institutions that once dominated the multilateral era (the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF) find themselves constrained by a more complex environment, new institutions and smaller networks are developing, much as the first small, furry mammals quietly appeared at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. Brummer incisively connects the dots between financial, trade and monetary regulation, charting the growth of these new bodies … This is an eye-opening and elegantly written tour, as history and economics interact, new institutions evolve, and soft law seeks to hold the new networks together.' John C. Coffee, Jr, Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law and Director, Center on Corporate Governance, Columbia Law School