The dispute settlement mechanism (DSM) adopted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) is rarely an effective tool of redressal. Driven by the profuse echoes of domestic producers and their aspirations to make a mark on and access foreign markets, States initiate trade disputes at the WTO. Much to their dismay, the majority of such disputes are not litigated, while the ones that are, are not litigated effectively. The project will examine the disputes initiated at the WTO as part of a larger universe consisting of potential cases that could have been pursued before the WTO but were never taken forward (“non-disputes”). The questions to consider herein are: what is the rationale behind the use of the WTO DSMs by States? How do States select which disputes to take to the WTO? What conditions stimulate the effective functioning of an international institution like the WTO? The project aims to adopt a neutral approach to overcome bias leading to methodological errors. The absence of a neutral approach in the past has led to incorrect inferences about sovereign interactions in international trade law, partial explanations of governments’ preferences vis-à-vis dispute initiation, and uninformed deliberations by stakeholders involved in the definition of the global trade policy agenda. Through comparative investigation, the research is conclusively able to analyse how the four key members of the WTO – China, the US, India, and the EU – choose to pursue WTO litigation by (1) constructing an original Global Trade Barriers Open Data Index (GTB-ODI) of the entire set of potential and actual WTO disputes concerning these WTO members in the 2010-2020 period and (2) assessing reasoning and explanations behind various hypotheses concerning governments’ decisions to initiate WTO disputes by adopting a sequential mixed method approach, which derives its roots from a combination of statistical analyses of the GTB-ODI and in-depth four case studies.