This book, as many books, has taken a long journey from its first inception to eventual publication. First ideas regarding a project on States’ reassertion of control over investment treaties and investment arbitration ripened in the spring of 2014, when I was still working as a full-time practitioner, and academic endeavours were, at the time, reserved for weekends or late nights. What appeared to be a growing trend then, in early 2014, seems to be an almost all-pervasive phenomenon in late 2016. Driven by public opinion turning from indifference towards investment protection and investor-State dispute settlement to scepticism or even fierce opposition, Contracting Parties to investment agreements are pursuing many avenues in order to curb a system that is being perceived – correctly or not – as having run out of control. What are these avenues? How do Contracting Parties pursue them? What is their potential for reasserting control over the investment treaty regime? What are the limits that public international law sets to their pursuit? This book offers answers to these and many other questions pertaining to Contracting Parties’ reassertion of control. To my knowledge, it is the first one to do so systematically, from a distinctively doctrinal perspective and with a view towards covering the crucial doctrinal and theoretical issues of the phenomenon of reassertion. Its contributions focus on the various avenues to reassert control and evaluate their viability through the lens of public international law – in particular, albeit far from exclusively, the law of treaties. For this purpose, it takes an almost monographical approach – with a plurality of authors – in targeting the most pertinent issues of reassertion of control over the investment treaty regime with respect to theoretical, procedural, substantive and policy issues.

I am proud to say that for this task I have assembled a brilliant team of authors who come from a variety of different academic and professional backgrounds and who hold a variety of different views on international investment law and arbitration: academics and practitioners, investment law specialists and general public international lawyers, investment arbitration enthusiasts and investment arbitration sceptics, among others.