Project

Arbitrating Extraction (Arbitrex) ethnographically enquires international investment arbitration as one of the growing forms of juridification of the corporate governance of global extraction. Investors-States arbitration (companies suing states) has multiplied five-fold between 2000 and 2021, the largest share of which (41%) concerns the extractive industries (energy and mining).

This private adjudication boom on issues related to state sovereignty, such as the public-private distribution of the extractive rent or the environmental protection of the national territory, reconfigures political, judicial and economic power across blurred scales (local, national and global) and regulatory authorities (public and private). 

On what legal practices and epistemological grounds are these disputes administered, and what does the emergence of this form of global private law reveal about the corporate governance of resource extraction in times of ecological crisis?The project examines how arbitral reasoning is produced, legitimised and enacted through three research axes:

1. the production, institutionalisation and circulation of arbitration knowledge;

2. the situated  practices of interpretation, evaluation and contestation of contracts and treaties by arbitrators, law firms, government officials, investors, social movements, and other peripheral actors implicated in disputes brought to arbitral courts;

3. the role of the arbitration system in reshaping the power-led geographies of the global extraction of mineral resources.

These research axes are empirically explored through a multi-sited ethnography of investment arbitration, spanning education centres, arbitral courts and institutions: sites where arbitral knowledge is transmitted, legal work is performed, and expertise is enacted. The research grounds the mutual translations of arbitral knowledge and governance practices via four ethnographic case studies of disputed extraction projects in Tanzania, Slovenia, Colombia and South Africa.