ISDS in the face of geopolitical crises

Celebrating Professor Andrea K. Bjorklund's residence as the Bredin Prat Distinguished Visiting Scholar 2026, Sciences Po Law School LLM Program in Transnational Arbitration & Dispute Settlement (TADS LLM) and Bredin Prat invite you to her keynote lecture:

ISDS in the face of geopolitical crises

Investment treaty disputes increasingly feature government policy decisions taken in response to geopolitical crises – sanctions regimes are an evident example – as well as public international law questions, including such complex matters as state responsibility for treaty violations in disputed territories. Given the increasing trend towards protectionism and government intervention in industrial policy, disputes featuring these types of sensitive issues seem likely to mushroom. ISDS did not cause these crises, but it operates as a stage where people see the dispute unspool and sometimes serves as a lightning rod for criticism that is both a reflection of concerns about the political sensitivities surrounding the dispute and about the mechanism of investment treaty arbitration itself. How can, or should, ISDS respond to these challenges? How can, or should, ISDS contribute to the rule of law in a world in which many states seem increasingly driven by power politics to the detriment of a rules-based system in which states are disciplined by international law obligations?

Andrea K. Bjorklund is a Full Professor and the L. Yves Fortier Chair in International Arbitration and International Commercial Law at McGill University Faculty of Law. In Winter 2018, she was a Plumer Fellow at St. Anne’s College and a Visiting Fellow in the Law Faculty, University of Oxford. In March 2019, she was elected a vice-president of the governing Executive Council of the American Society of International Law. In July 2019, she took up the role of Associate Dean (Graduate Studies) at McGill Law for a three-year mandate. In July 2022, she was appointed Norton Rose Fulbright Faculty Scholar in Arbitration and Commercial Law for a third time.

In addition to serving as an adviser to the American Law Institute’s project on restating the U.S. law of international commercial arbitration, she is a member of the Advisory Board of the Investment Treaty Forum of the British Institute for International and Comparative Law. Professor Bjorklund was the inaugural ICSID Scholar-in-Residence for 2014-2015 and was Editor-in-Chief of the Yearbook on International Investment Law and Policy (OUP) from 2012 to 2015. She sits on the panel of arbitrators of the AAA’s International Centre for Dispute Resolution and on the roster of NAFTA Chapter 19 arbitrators, and has joined the panel of arbitrators for the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) for a six-year term. She was appointed by Canada’s Ministry of International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development.

Professor Bjorklund is widely published in investment law and dispute resolution and transnational contracts. She is currently working on a new book with Stefan Kröll & Franco Ferrari: Cambridge Compendium of International Commercial and Investment Arbitration (Cambridge University Press).