The revolt against international tribunals

Paul B. Stephan

Chapter 7 in A Research Agenda for Global Power Shifts and International Economic Law, 2025, pp 191-206 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter reviews the attacks, growing in significance and number, on the use of international tribunals to resolve disputes over trade and investment policy. The General Agrement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), restructured in 1994 as the World Trade Organization (WTO), developed a judicialized system, headed since the restructuring by a permanent Appellate Body, to address in legal terms dispute between members. Beginning in the 1960s, states began to create a network of treaties that enabled ad hoc arbitration of disputes between states and foreign investors. The latter took off after the end of the Cold War, at the same time as the WTO replaced the GATT and offered much more formal dispute resolution. Both were seen as triumphs and concrete evidence of the centrality of post-Cold-War liberal internationalism. In the last decade, both these systems have faced substantial resistance. The Trump and Biden administrations have disempowered the WTO Appellate Body, while a growing number of states have pulled out of the investor arbitration system. The resistance has significantly scaled back the WTO dispute resolution process; investor arbitration, being more dispersed, has not suffered the same kind of body blow, but the trend is not in favor of the legalized dispute resolution system. The chapter places these developments within a larger debate over the appeal and efficacy of liberal internationalism. It considers whether the heavily legalized conception of the international rule of law—a commitment at the heart of the 1990s version of liberal internationalism—is either necessary or desirable in today's world.

Keywords: International law; Liberal internationalism; International economic law; International dispute resolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035311491
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