IP law such as TRIPS entrenches biopolitical control by restricting access to essential resources, and marginalizing non-Western knowledge systems.

IP is significant both economically (materially) and epistemologically (symbolically) to constructing and maintaining global relations of power as they map European legal frameworks globally. Intellectual Property rights have been conflated with right to culture and production through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 276, Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples Article 317 and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Article 158. In 1994, the first multilateral international trade agreements related to IP, NAFTA and TRIPS were enacted, setting in motion a globalized system of IP ushered in under the auspices of trade regulation. Historically, IP emerged out of particular Western ideologies to address economic desires of capital accumulation by turning ideas and creativity into property and granting power over their production and dissemination (WIPO, 1998). A main point of contention within intellectual property law is that it remains grounded in Western ideologies of development, continues to extract resources from historically exploited nations and peoples, restricts access to resources needed for survival (medicines and food), and restricts access to technology and literatures that facilitate economic participation in global capitalism (Gana, 1996; Shiva, 1997). Instituting a legal mechanism for granting ideas and creative enterprise the authority, privilege and protection of property has the potential to address histories of appropriation and extermination of indigenous ways of knowing and living, or ethnocide—the deliberate destruction of the culture of an ethnic group (Shiva, 1997). However, turning to a European system to address issues of European colonization necessitates recognition and material redress of coloniality as a modern reality and therefore runs counter to dominant logics of modernity as linear and progressive (Mignolo, 2011), and of colonial powers as the exception to the rule of law (Agamben, 2005). Race and culture present a complex paradox within rights discourse in general, and intellectual property rights specifically (Harris, 1987; Sunder, 2012). Historically, law has served as a colonial tool to legitimize imperial expansion and confer wealth and privilege upon whites (Bell, 1993; Harris, 1993). The prospect of redressing marginality within the law is certainly quite sticky and contentious: Is it possible to address the needs of marginalized populations within the very system that has created their marginality? It has been argued that intellectual property rights can address global poverty and marginalization of indigenous peoples by patenting traditional knowledge, thereby allowing economic growth through commodification of that patent (Brush & Stabinsky,1996). In addition, intellectual property rights have been argued to be a site through which the pirating and appropriation of traditional cultural knowledge might be addressed (Sunder, 2002). The fundamental concern of IP law as addressing needs of peoples through the market however, signals a grounding in neoliberal ideology, which I have demonstrated is traced to histories and logics of imperialism and colonization under rhetoric of development. The concept of development and of the market is fundamentally tied to logics of capitalism and is not related to need for goods and services, as commonly presumed, but to profit motive geared toward inducing crises of scarcity that is primarily “concerned with people’s ability to pay rather than their need for commodities” (Rodney 1972, p. 10, emphasis my own). Privatization, deregulation and eliminating barriers to trade and the flow of goods characterize neoliberal policies like NAFTA and TRIPS. Given the history of private property and its connection to capitalism, imperialism, slavery, and colonization, it is impossible to divorce the ideas of property from its ideological connections to race and gender.