Perrone: International Investment Law as Transnational Law

Nicolás M. Perrone (Universidad Andrés Bello) has posted International Investment Law as Transnational Law (in The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law, Peer Zumbansen ed., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

In the last twenty years, the international investment regime has attracted wide attention. Academics, policymakers and civil society have studied this regime using different analytical and normative frameworks, defending as much as criticizing international investment treaties and arbitration. Interestingly, however, there is not much literature analyzing international investment law through the lenses of transnational law. This limited interest is surprising given the transnational law origin of the regime – as shown by Sornarajah and Anghie – and the relevance of transnational law to understand the relationship between public and private law and international and domestic law in global economic relations. This chapter relies on a transnational law framework to show that these legal categories are contingent and only explain certain aspects of the international investment regime. A transnational law framework provides a valuable vantage point to assess the political economy of this regime, in particular, how it affects the relationship between states, foreign investors and local communities. The analysis begins from arbitrators’ ability to interpret the law or, as Michaels suggests, to dream of delocalized law.