Re-Constructing the International Law on Foreign Investment: The Third World and ICSID in the 21st Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The international law on foreign investment is one of the major areas of international law where the Third World has usually adopted a different stance compared to the North in espousing the rules that regulate the relations between the relevant state and non-state actors. Today, over thirty years after the New International Economic Order (NIEO) was declared, North-South international investment agreements have proliferated, and more often than not, depart significantly from the NIEO's prescriptions. Many of these agreements proceed on the basis that investment protection is necessary for the development of Third World countries and they have the overarching purpose of protecting foreign investment in the Third World. It is against this backdrop of the perceived need to protect foreign investment in Third World countries, and the position that investment protection will facilitate investment flows to these countries, that the World Bank established the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) at the height of the decolonization era in 1966. Although it is not clear that being a signatory to the ICSID Convention facilitates investment flows, it is certain that Third World States assume the bulk of obligations under investment agreements and have been defendants in an overwhelming majority of ICSID cases. In line with Third World resistance to international measures that do not reflect their interests, a movement is developing that challenges not only the Bretton Woods Institutions and the World Trade Organization, but also foreign investment activities that are inimical to Third World interests. In order to analyse ICSID's engagement with the Third World and vice versa, I historicize ICSID and place it within a broader socio-legal framework of North-South relations. This paper represents an attempt to read ICSID decisions from a TWAIL perspective. The aim is to discuss the nature of the law that develops through the process of the interaction among states, Third World peoples and movements, foreign investors, and the decisions of ICSID tribunals. The initial reaction is to assume that with the nature of the investment agreements already concluded, the Third World's position in this order is not the most favourable, but with increased activism on the part of peoples, a re-construction of the international investment order (that ICSID tribunals might not be able to completely ignore) might be developing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".