Introduction

Summary

This book interrogates justifications, techniques and legal forms that arose in the past and continue to resonate in the international regime to protect foreign investment. What is striking is how past practices resemble suppositions relied upon at present by investment law’s norm entrepreneurs. This matrix of practices is characterized as ‘alibis’ in so far as they provide cover for a set of international investment law rules and institutions that are increasingly difficult to defend. The method employed conjoins discursive practices with understandings about power, expressed in legal-institutional and processual forms. It is analogous to what Foucault describes as ‘archaeology’ which, when partnered with ‘genealogy,’ produces something akin to dispositif: an ensemble of discourse, institutions, legislation and ‘authoritative phenomena’, incorporating ‘the said as much as the unsaid’. By uncovering investment law’s normative ends, and connecting them to this indefensible past, the book reveals how investment law aims to dampen the political aspirations of states and citizens of the Global South. The object of the book is to imagine new ways forward that are less ruinous to those left outside of investment law’s solicitude.