International investment law from below: Taking local community rights seriously

This thesis challenges the traditional conception of extractive investment disputes as only affecting states and foreign investors, and instead takes a view of such disputes ‘from below’, centring the interests and experiences of local communities affected by extractive foreign investment projects. Interviews with affected local community members reveal how investment arbitration is more than an elite legal process abstracted from the disputed ground. Instead, the lives of affected communities are bound up in the goings-on of investment tribunals, in the stories that are being told about them, the fight they put their souls into, and the future of their homes. Incorporating a qualitative methodology into the study of investment arbitration brings a human aspect to an epistemic community that tends to uphold traditional black-letter and doctrinal boundaries. Taking a strictly legalistic view of such cases works to obscure the real-world impacts of how the international economic regime is ordered. If the rights and interests of local communities are made visible, we can start conceptualising them as important in the design of investment projects and resolution of disputes, and stop pretending that they do not matter.