In this paper I use a case study of the current trade negotiations involving education in Europe – the recently stalled Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTiPs) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) to explore the inadequacy of the conceptual pairing of global and local, structure and agency, and the ways in which these are made to collapse into each other; global/structural and local/agency. Turning our spatial imaginary on its side toward a topological rather than top down/bottom up view (Allen and Cochrane, 2010), and viewing power as residing in both structures and agents, we can begin to see how different actors, their capacity to frame and broker ideas, and institutional capability (Cox, 1996), enable us to frame these negotiations as dynamic, shifting, contested, contradictory and stalling. Focusing on what Sassen (2006) calls new logics and critical tipping points, we can see the shifting balance between strategies and new structural selectivities and the ways in which these are mediated by wider global and regional geostrategic politics and economics.

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