Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The object of the article is to recover the institutional memory of the 1980s debt crisis, when the decolonized world experienced forms of tutelage at the hands of international financial institutions, so as to sketch out material and discursive continuities with investment law’s present. The paper asks whether damage awards in investment arbitration serve functions analogous to state indebtedness in the 1980s. As during the 1980–1989 debt crisis, states are expected to generate the conditions for investor confidence by, among other things, guaranteeing rights to property and to contract. State indebtedness, in both periods, places stress on government budgets and reduces the living standards of poor people, contributing to heightened inequality within and between states. The article begins with a social-theoretical discussion of how debt serves to curb the possibilities for political action. This is followed by a review of IMF borrowing practices in the 1980s and a discussion of the merits of comparison with contemporary investment law. The narrative frames arising during the 1980s debt crisis that continue to have resonance in the era of investment law are taken up in subsequent sections, focusing on the refrains of mismanagement, the missing development angle, shrunken policy space and irrelevance of ability to pay. The method is predominantly qualitative, although reference is made to relevant empirical work. In the course of the discussion, the Tethyan Copper v. Pakistan (2019) ruling is periodically revisited as a specimen of how tribunals arrive at damages assessments in investment arbitration. The upshot is that indebtedness in the contemporary world serves functions similar to that in the 1980s: principally to constrain policy capacity in a wide range of sectors. These binding constraints serve the interests of only a small set of actors, while those rendered most vulnerable by these constraints are relegated to the margins.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".