Investment

This entry is concerned with the rise and fall of investment treaties and investor-state arbitration after the end of the cold war. It provides a brief history of international investment law after the end of the cold war. Initially this is a story of the growing desirability of a high degree of investment protection, followed by several waves of backlash in both the Global South and, more recently, the Global North, starting in the late 1990s. The entry argues that the investment treaty regime consolidated into its current recognizable form only in the 1990s, after the cold war ended and when the Washington Consensus came to the fore. The rise of investment treaty arbitration, and more generally, of investor-state arbitration, is central to this story.After an introduction that focuses on the unipolar moment after 1989 and its implications for global economic integration and the law that underpins it, the first section considers how the investment treaty regime emerged during the period before investment treaty arbitration. This was followed by the BIT generation, after the end of the Cold War, when the investment regime as we know it today emerged thanks to rapid growth in investor-state arbitration. This growth led to growing concerns about the impact of investment treaties. These concerns manifested themselves in several waves of backlash against the investment regime and have led to the ongoing re-evaluation of investment treaties and investor-state arbitration