Investment Treaties & the Legal Imagination: How Foreign Investors Play by Their Own Rules

Abstract

Once considered a highly specific domain, international investment law has come to the forefront of legal debates and is one of the most divisive areas of international law. Under international investment treaties, foreign investors enjoy rights, have limited obligations, and can rely on a highly efficient dispute settlement mechanism: investor–state arbitration.1 In Investment Treaties & the Legal Imagination, Nicolás M. Perrone investigates how this regime evolved from a historical perspective. The book highlights that international investment law as we know it is the outcome of the project of business leaders, bankers, and lawyers in the 1950s and 1960s. For Perrone, these figures successfully developed a legal imagination (i.e. a vision of international investment relations) that gradually shaped and still pervades international investment law. Far from celebrating this vision, Perrone successfully illuminates what this worldview has focused on (investors’ rights) and what it has silenced, marginalized, and made invisible (local communities and Indigenous peoples’ needs). He then calls for the emergence of a new, more inclusive legal vision that considers not only investors’ needs but also those of local communities to achieve inclusive, sustainable development and peaceful, just, and prosperous relations among nations.