International Trade Law Commons^™

International Investment Law And Climate Justice: The Search For A Just Green Investment Order, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe, Adebayo Majekolagbe

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Efforts are underway to craft responses to the climate crisis within the international investment order. This Article highlights international investment law (“IIL”) and international climate law (“ICL”) as two basic governance contexts within which investment- related responses to climate change are being designed. There is, however, a multilevel—normative and institutional—dissonance between both regimes that makes for an asymmetric integration of the regimes at best, or worse still, the escalation of the injustices which have characterized both. While similar in their recognition of international investment as an important tool for responding to climate change, assumptions and approaches under both regimes are …

Africanization And The Reform Of International Investment Law, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Recent trends in reforms by African states in the field of International Investment Law (IIL) has been dubbed as the Africanization of IIL. These important debates regarding reform of IIL in Africa foreground innovative aspects of International Investment Agreements (IIA) in contrast to the traditional IIL regime. The debates also remind us of the relative lack of African voices in the global IIL reform agenda. There is however little research that critically analyze the Africanization of IIL thesis.

This article undertakes this analysis. Drawing on TWAIL, it characterizes Africanization of IIL into ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ reforms. The article analyzes the …

Symposium Introduction: Vulnerabilities In The Trade And Investment Regimes In The Age Of Covid-19, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe, Clair Gammage

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This Symposium is one of the follow-up publications to the Afronomicslaw.org Webinar III on “Vulnerability in the Trade and Investment Regime in the Age of COVID-19”

‘Vulnerability’ in trade and investment regimes is not a new phenomenon. Nor, is the concept of ‘crisis’. While IEL scholarship has acknowledged some of the way(s) in which the formalisation of international legal rules in trade and investment can act like a ‘straightjacket’ on global south states, sustaining and creating forms of dependencies that are difficult to escape, there is a notable lack of meaningful engagement with the contours and manifestations of concepts like …