Africa's International Investment Law Regimes

Abstract Although averaged only about 3% of the inflow of the global foreign direct investment (FDI) over the last half-century, African states were asked to answer about a quarter of all investor–state claims adjudicated under the auspices of the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) since its inception in 1965. The African states’ support was indispensable for the creation of ICSID but once it began its adjudicative function, it gave the Africans a rough start. In the early decades, many of the newly independent states refused to participate and suffered adverse default judgments by tribunals that lacked diversity reenforcing the feeling of marginalization. Since the beginning of the new millennium, however, Africa dropped the boycott, began defending itself more vigorously, helped shape the jurisprudence, and won most of the cases. At about the same time, Africa began to appreciate the shortcomings of the existing regime of international investment law and embarked on reform efforts. Those efforts essentially took a continental and regional dimension. This book conducts a qualitative review of all aspects of Africa’s ICSID cases published in English under 13 different substantive and procedural topics and answers the question whether the adopted and proposed continental, regional, and bilateral reform efforts are indeed responsive to the actual deficiencies of the existing regime as evidenced in the cases that the African states defended in the last 60 years.