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.

This article explores Bertolt Brecht’s significance for the most advanced forms of contemporary experimental and avant-garde theater.Brecht is one of the most popular and most-produced playwrights world-wide, and certainly in Germany; however many mainstream productions tend to deprive his work of its radical political and aesthetic edge.Nevertheless, contemporary avant-garde and experimental theaterwould be fundamentally unthinkable without Brecht, and it is particularly indebted to the most radical phase of Brecht’s career, when he and his team were working on learning plays (Lehrstücke) in the late 1920s and early 1930s during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Brecht’s conception of a separation of the elements, of putting mechanisms of power clearly on display, and of creating collective agency that, via script-based theater, tendentially removed power from the hands of writers and directors, are fundamental building blocks of contemporary experimental theater. The article explores such forms and their impact on the basis of experimental work by Robert Wilson, Wanda Golonka, and She She Pop.