Extractive separations: A Polanyian note on the international investment treaty regime

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between extractive industries and the In-ternational Investment Treaty Regime. This regime, I argue, works to separate extrac-tive investments from the social conditions that make those investments and extractions possible. Examining 3 recent cases—Bear Creek, Von Pezold and Rockhopper, I argue that international investment arbitration invokes novel and deeper separations. More-over, the kinds of separations now enabled in the investment treaty regime take diverse form. To explore this diversity, this paper foregrounds 3 techniques of separation made visible in these 3 cases including techniques of displacement, differentiation and ab-straction. This, in turn, signals a broader contradiction in international investment ar-bitration— a form of practice now deeply contested by those keen to rethread investment governance to social context but shaped by decisions that sever investments from those contexts in ever abstract ways. Read in Polanyian terms, I argue there is a tension be-tween investments deeply embedded in social contexts but increasingly disembedded as abstracted legal and financial objects.