Politics of Intellectual Property Rights and Access to Medicines

VABONA MUZAKA Lecturer in Global Politics in the Department ofPolitics and International Relations, University of Southampton, UK, and a visiting researcher in the Department of Politics, University of Stockholm, Sweden.

• The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights and Access to Medicines: Some Empirical and Theoretical Issues Intellectual Property Rights and Pharmaceuticals Linking IPRs to Trade: The Making of TRIPs Contestations Post-TRIPs and the Emergence of the IP-access to Medicines Debate TRIPs Revisited Shifting IP Issues between Regimes and Fora: Contestations Continued Conclusions Bibliography

'This is a masterly example of how the international political economy in which we all live should be analysed. Muzaka takes the highly technical and deeply complicated issue of intellectual property rights and access to affordable medicines and reveals with great acuity and skill the politics that shapes the way decisions are taken and power wielded in this important arena of policy. She has produced a study that is both empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated.' Anthony Payne, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK