Rule-takers or Rule-makers? A New Look at African Bilateral Investment Treaty Practice

Fourth  issue, 2016 of the Transnational Dispute Management includes a paper by Dmitriy Skougarevskiy, researcher at the Institute for the Rule of Law (and by his co-author Wolfgang Alschner). This paper is titled «Rule-takers or Rule-makers? A New Look at African Bilateral Investment Treaty Practice».

Abstract

Who are the rule-takers and rule-makers in the African BIT universe? Using computational measures of textual similarity this paper provides a nuanced empirical answer to this question. First, we find that African states tend to be rule-takers in North-South relations, yet enjoy greater agency in negotiations of South-South BITs. Only a few African countries, however, use their greater say in intra-African negotiations to include public policy exceptions in BITs. Indeed, recent North-South BITs contain more policy space than their Southern counterparts in Africa. Second, rule-makers and rule-takers ...