Professor Susan K. Sell | School of Regulation and Global Governance

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Professor Susan K. Sell was an American scholar and an influential figure in the field of international political economy. Susan’s research focused on intellectual property, trade, investment, and private power. Her career was characterised by her interrogation of power structures and her mentorship of PhD students and early career researchers.

Biography

Susan held a PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and went on to teach at Pomona College and Claremont Graduate School before joining the faculty of George Washington University (GWU) in 1991. She worked at GWU until 2016, serving as the Director of the Institute for Global and International Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs from 2007 to 2012.

Susan was a Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet, formerly the Regulatory Institutions Network) at the Australian National University from 2016 to 2023.

Susan served on the Board of Geneva-based IP-Watch, a reporting service targeted at under-resourced negotiating delegations and was a consultant for the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the World Health Organization. Susan was appointed to the Expert Advisory Group for the United Nations Secretary General’s High-level Panel on Public Health and Access to Medicines for 2015-2016.

Susan also served on the editorial boards of the Review of International Political Economy, European Journal of International Relations, Global Governance, and International Studies Quarterly.

Books

Susan wrote and edited several books during her career. Power and Ideas: North-South Politics of Intellectual Property and Antitrust traced multilateral negotiations on technology transfer, intellectual property and competition policy across the rise of calls for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the 1970s and its demise in the context of the “lost decade” of the 1980s Global Debt Crisis. Published in 1998, the book highlights how developing countries sought to advance an import-substitution focused pro-development agenda, reversing the flow of resources from the south to the north, only to see the pressures of debt repayment force a renewed stress on export-led growth.

Susan’s 2003 book, Private Power and Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights, showed how private interests are exercising more power in international politics, rather than governments. It traced developments in the trade regime across sectors spanning intellectual property, services, financial services, and investment, arguing that market protection practices of multinational corporations shaped the adoption by the World Trade Organisation of the Agreement in Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in 1994. This book has been translated into Chinese and Korean.

Susan’s most recent book, The Global Battles Over Intellectual Property Protection and Enforcement: Cat and Mouse, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. In it, Sell addresses a strategic shift on the part of the United States, European states, and multilateral corporations, which found it increasingly difficult to secure their interests through the direct application of power or through multilateral institutions. Cat and Mouse examines the increasing importance of “forum shopping” and “forum shifting” strategies in efforts to construct or challenge intellectual property rights.

Co-authored with Christopher May and published in 2005, Intellectual Property Rights: A Critical History discussed the history of making property out of knowledge by tracing the social conflicts and political structures over two thousand years. Susan also co-edited Who Governs the Globe? released in 2010 with Deborah Avant and Martha Finnemore.

Having completed her trilogy of books on intellectual property rights and development, Susan aimed to advance a wider study mapping the contours of “twenty-first century capitalism,” emphasizing its dependence on the accumulation and protection of market power across financial, technology, and pharmaceutical industries. These interests were foreshadowed in a range of articles and conference presentations, including a special issue on the “Political Economies of Global Health” in Review of International Political Economy, coedited with Owain Williams.

One of Susan's passions was assisting early career researchers in furthering their research and academic careers, and in supervising PhD students. She championed this work on the CAP Research Committee and in her supervision and support of students and ECRs at RegNet.

Susan Sell with PhD students — Cynthia Couette

Full list of publications