With digital peacebuilding, its epistemology and methodology are moving into new terrains before the problems of the older analogue order have been settled. Digital peacebuilding is emerging to respond to the conflict risks of the new digital international. It is a flimsy development at that, while the old order is still conflict prone, even if it is more settled within the liberal international architecture than it once was. The anticipation and excitement the Arab Spring generated (particularly in the case of Egypt) about bottom-up processes of democratization, which were in turn aided and facilitated by digital technologies, dissipated quickly as the old international order machinated the undermining of these dynamics and instead favored the establishment of a dictatorship. The liberal system exihibits an inability to keep up with the digital change that is occurring at the local level. The local’s attempt to identify ways to use said technologies in order to (re)claim agency in the way that peace, security, and quotidianity are shaped and established is met with significant resistance by the old analogue, hierarchical, geopolitical, and territorial international order.

This chapter analyses the alternative scenarios of how a multilateral investment court could come about, including an assessment of existing international frameworks that are likely to host that institution (e.g. the WTO, OECD, ICSID and UNCITRAL). The author argues that the EU’s active engagement in the field could fall victim to its own success – if it ever becomes successful, that is. If the proposed ICS turns out to be effective, efficient and accepted as more legitimate than investor-state arbitration, it might in fact inhibit the efforts of establishing a multilateral investment court. Alternatively, the increasing use of these instruments could result in a creeping multilateralization, creating a quasi-multilateral network of treaty-centred investment courts, a shrine to Western neoliberal values. A glimpse of hope, on the other hand, might come as a spin-off effect of current developments, should existing frameworks such as ICSID, UNCITRAL and the WTO rise to the occasion.

The chapter addresses the phases in making a new treaty: negotiation, drafting and production of the text. It discusses how to prepare for treaty negotiations and how to influence the drafting effectively, differences in the making of multilateral and bilateral treaties, and identifying the main actors involved in negotiating and drafting a new treaty. It explains in detail how to structure a treaty text, including title, preamble, final clauses, testimonium, signature block. It then examines the process of preparing and producing a treaty text for signature, including adoption, translation, formatting, binding and sealing. At each stage the role of the Treaty Office is highlighted. The importance of Full Powers is explained, as well as how to produce them and when it is permissible to dispense with them. Lastly, the chapter provides useful checklists for Treaty Offices and depositaries in making new bilateral and multilateral treaties.

This chapter focuses on the treaty procedures that apply to the types of withdrawal and termination that are most commonly handled in Treaty Offices, rather than the details of all the legal rules that could theoretically be invoked in a treaty dispute. It examines modes of unilateral and agreed termination of bilateral treaties, unilateral and agreed withdrawal from a multilateral treaty, and types of termination of multilateral treaties. It then turns to the issues of continuing obligations after the ending of treaty relations and domestic procedures for treaty withdrawals and terminations.