Project

Arbitraging 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 2015, 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 such disputes administered, and what can the emergence of such global private law tell us about the corporate governance of resource extraction?The project examines how international arbitration is transforming the legal topography of global extraction, a term used to designate the relations and hierarchies between the various normative orders that govern the supply chains of extractive resources. We will investigate how international arbitral reasoning is produced, legitimised and enacted through three research axes: i) the production, institutionalisation and circulation of arbitration knowledge, ii) the situated ad-hoc administrative legal practices of the interpretation and evaluation of contracts and treaties by arbitrators, law firms, government officials, investors, and the peripheral actors implicated in disputes brought to arbitral courts; iii) the role of the arbitration system in reshaping the power-led geographies of the global extraction of mineral resources. These research axes will be empirically explored through a multi-sited ethnography of arbitration’s centres of semiosis: education centres where arbitral knowledge is transmitted, law firms where legal work is performed, and private courts and arbitral institutions where expertise is enacted. Rather than considering them independently, the research will focus on the mutual translations of arbitral knowledge and governance practices between these sites, via three case studies of disputed extraction projects in Tanzania, Colombia and Canada.