In the last two chapters, we have focused on the world inside arbitration. In the next two, we zoom our lens outward to put it in a political context.

How has the world responded to investment- treaty arbitration and arbitration to the world? More than twenty years ago, sociology- and- law scholars Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth (1996) had a prediction. Their book was the first major study of international arbitrators. At that time, arbitration was mostly an inter- corporate affair. A typical case might involve a London insurance company that insured a Massachusetts shipper but failed to pay out on the policy. Instead of going to a court in the United Kingdom or the United States (where one party might have a home- country advantage), the two companies could opt for private arbitration in a chamber of commerce. To the extent the story involved the public sector, it was limited to the strategies the arbitration community used to get national courts to agree to help enforce the awards. Nonetheless, with the 1995 publication of the University of Miami's Jan Paulsson's famous article celebrating the first investment- treaty case (AAPL v. Sri Lanka, discussed in chapter 2), there were hints that states might soon be more directly embroiled in arbitrations. Dezalay and Garth wondered whether this meeting of private and public actors might push arbitration in a more social democratic and green direction (Dezalay and Garth 1996, 312).