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The Prospects of International Trade Regulation: From Fragmentation to Coherence edited by Thomas Cottier and Panagiotis Delimatsis Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011

This volume is the result of the first stage of a National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) project, ‘Trade Regulation – International Trade: From Fragmentation to Coherence’, operating at the University of Bern’s World Trade Institute (WTI). One of the book’s editors, Thomas Cottier, is the Managing Director of the WTI and the Director of the NCCR – Trade Regulation project. The NCCR – Trade Regulation is a project of grand scale: the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) provided an initial four-year phase of funding of 10,400,000 CHF, as well as 9,400,000 CHF for a second four-year phase, which is ongoing and will conclude in 2013. The funding is being used to support research across 12 individual projects (IPs), with experienced and more junior researchers contributing to each project, and input from political scientists as well as lawyers. This edited collection aims to synthesize the results of the initial phase of research. The IPs address trade regulation across a wide range of subject matters and perspectives, but share the common goal of exploring themes of fragmentation and coherence in their various international trade contexts. In particular, the book strives to identify the regulatory debates that lie ahead and to make policy recommendations in light of those dilemmas.1 A chapter is devoted to each project, with several project participants co-authoring each contribution. With 48 different contributing authors and over 450 pages of text devoted to summarizing four years of effort spent engaging in 12 separate projects, it is an understatement to describe this book as a highly ambitious undertaking. Perhaps inevitably, some aspects of the volume are more successful than others. The editors have utilized two useful techniques that add significant value to the individual contributions and to the volume as a whole. First, every chapter begins with a box of bullet-point ‘Key Messages’. Given that each project is attempting to summarize several years’ worth of work in a condensed space, these summary items are a particularly helpful method of highlighting the authors’ key takeaway messages. Second, the editors (together with colleagues Katja Gehne and Tetyana Payosova), have written an extensive and very useful Introduction. With many if not most edited collections, it is possible to begin and end one’s perusal by reading only the specific chapters of interest. While introductory chapters generally signal unifying elements of collections in greater or lesser detail, they are not always essential reading in and of