Overview

Today, investor-state arbitration embodies the worst fears of those concerned about runaway globalization - a far cry from its framers' intentions. Why did governments create a special legal system in which foreign investors can bring cases directly against states? This book takes readers through the key decisions that created investor-state arbitration, drawing on internal documents from several governments and extensive interviews to illustrate the politics behind this new legal system. The corporations and law firms that dominate investor-state arbitration today were not present at its creation. In fact, there was almost no lobbying from investors. Nor did powerful states have a strong preference for it. Nor was it created because there was evidence that it facilitates investment - there was no such evidence. International officials with peacebuilding and development aims drove the rise of investor-state arbitration. This book puts forward a new historical institutionalist explanation to illuminate how the actions of these officials kicked off a process of gradual institutional development. While these officials anticipated many developments, including an enormous caseload from investment treaties, over time this institutional framework they created has been put to new purposes by different actors. Institutions do not determine the purposes to which they may be put, and this book's analysis illustrates how unintended consequences emerge and why institutions persist regardless.

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9780191831553

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Reviews

How can we explain one of the most puzzling and controversial international law regimes of our time: investor-state dispute settlement? Based on painstaking archival research and interviews, St John goes beyond the narrative that capital importing countries, pushed by corporate greed and investor lobbying, signed on to investment treaties without knowing what they got into. Instead, she demonstrates that well-meaning international bureaucrats, at the World Bank, were largely behind the emergence of this exceptional regime with, also for them, unintended consequences. The book offers a captivating story of how international institutions matter and how innocent, incremental steps can create a path dependent Frankenstein that may be difficult to control or reform. -- Joost Pauwelyn, Professor of International Law, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Investment treaties are under fire - in Brussels, in Washington, and around the world. As billionaire investors use ISDS to extract millions from governments, critics describe the process as toxic and embodying runaway globalization. Taylor St John offers a lively and balanced account of how ISDS came into being. Drawing on thousands of original documents, and dozens of interviews, she takes us inside ISDSs founding moments, revealing that this was not a hyper-globalizers conspiracy. -- Ngaire Woods, Professor of Global Economic Governance, University of Oxford The world has, in recent years, woken up to Investor-State Dispute Settlement, which is viewed by many as a corporate assault on the sovereign rights of developed and developing countries alike. In her fascinating and meticulous book, Taylor St. John unearths the origins of ISDS, showing how a group of idealistic mid-twentieth century international civil servants planted the seeds of a system that would over time draw in national governments, international investors, and lawyers into the controversial practice we know today. St. John's book employs both cutting-edge international relations theory and painstaking archival research to illuminate how the world came, incrementally and unexpectedly, to adopt a system that is both deeply entrenched and widely reviled. -- Mark Pollack, Professor of Political Science and Law, Temple University

Author Information

Taylor St John is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, PluriCourts, University of Oslo, and Senior Research Associate, Global Economic Governance Programme, University of Oxford

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