There is an ongoing debate about supply chain linkages between African and foreign firms and the impact of GSCs' activities on African states. This chapter contributes to the discussion by studying the impact of the US and Chinese presence in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) region, via supply chains, on economic growth and development comparatively. It argues that the expanding supply chain trade, especially the rapidly growing trade with China, is diversifying intermediate goods and services exports from SACU states and expanding their industrial capabilities. Politically, SACU is at an inflection point; initial gains from GSC trade could spur further economic liberalization or could incentivize ruling coalitions to double down on inward-looking policies. The chapter also highlights some emerging trends in SACU supply chain trade with the two great powers, using intermediate goods and services trade data. It ends with a discussion of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on supply chains in the SACU region.

In this chapter, the method of ‘frame-determination’ for IIA expropriation clauses is applied and three limits of the actus reus condition of typical IIA expropriation clauses are identified. (1) On the macro-structural level, concerning the interaction of IIA clauses with the rest of international law, facile references to customary international law are shown to be problematic: ‘’ in IIAs does not refer to a customary norm of certain validity and great specificity. (2) On the micro-structural level, the necessity of treating direct and indirect expropriation as fully equivalent is structurally inherent in typical IIAs. (3) All legality conditions are equal and cannot be doubled in the actus reus of indirect expropriation. The structure of typical IIA clauses does not support the majority of arguments based on ‘police powers’ or on a ‘right to regulate’.

This chapter deconstructs the main argument of orthodox doctrinal scholarship on regulatory expropriation. It argues that the strong impetus of orthodox scholarship to solve problems leads both those favouring strong investor protection and those arguing for a wide state freedom to regulate to see the problem in virtually the same terms and to develop the same solution. The problem identified is that neither of the two extremes is sustainable; the solution is that a balance has to be struck. Yet such a view is ideological, not legal, because it cannot contemplate and must deny a priori the possibility that IIA expropriation clauses are skewed in one direction or that the law does not provide for a balanced, proportional solution. Doctrinal scholarship, however, must analyse the law as it is, not as we may wish it to be.

In 2017, the Chinese Communist Party began to pay close attention to the development of China’s artificial intelligence (AI) industry, likely motivated by rising tension between the USA and China. This chapter documents the suite of policies that followed and their impact on the evolution of the AI industry in China. First, the AI industry has become another policy tool for the ruling Chinese Communist Party, especially during national emergencies. Second, the AI push likely will further encourage vertical integration of the AI value chain, especially for lead firms. Third, rather than foster market or modular transactions along the AI value chain, Chinese government subsidies and preference for national champions will foster relational and even captive ties between actors along the AI value chain. Ironically, these policies may encourage fragmentation of data architecture in China instead of consolidation.

Chapter 1 introduces the broader framework for the volume and its place in the broader literature on the relationship between economic interdependence and international cooperation and conflict. It draws attention to the deeper political origins of GSCs in the grand strategies of outward-oriented political survival models and identifies some of the pivotal questions regarding the broader role of GSCs in the international relations of East Asia. A focus on GSCs is especially pertinent to our world time as East Asia faces the most complex bundle of geopolitical and geo-economic threats in decades. This provides a natural experiment of sorts for gauging the extent to which GSCs may provide a more resilient foundation for interstate cooperation than older forms of interdependence have at various historical junctures or, alternatively, whether they amount to equally vulnerable targets of nationalistic and autarkic ambitions, inward-looking turns in the US and China, the trade and technology war, and other geopolitical shocks from within the region. Finally, the chapter introduces the rest of the volume, with different chapters addressing various dimensions of the relationship between GSCs and changing features of East Asian and Asia-Pacific international relations.

This chapter explores the rhetorical framing of GSCs in US politics in the context of rising inequality and shifting geopolitics. A growing body of international political economy has focused on the distributional consequences of globalization for demographic groups in the global North and South, and this chapter looks at how political actors’ interpretations of GSCs have framed contemporary debates over trade. The chapter analyzes the debate over trade centered on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement during the 2016 US presidential primary and general election campaigns. When expressing their support for or opposition to the TPP, candidates largely relied on conventional protectionist and liberal framings of trade. With a handful of exceptions, the specificities of GSCs were absent from the political debate surrounding the TPP on the presidential campaign trail, despite the dominance of GSCs in the trade relationships covered by the treaty. Nonetheless, the effect of supply chains on international trade was implicitly reflected in candidates’ identification of the uneven distributional consequences of contemporary trade policies.

This chapter considers the possibility of an anti-marketised global justice, which is conceptualised as ‘occupying’ global justice. After considering the question of ‘reform or revolution?’, the chapter discusses four tactics of anti-marketised global justice: first, unplugged global justice, which concerns the abandonment of marketised visual and linguistic habits; second, despectacularised global justice, which emphasises the slow and quiet, therefore finding the time and means to focus on context; third, unmasked global justice, which reveals stereotypes by means of irony and satire and has a theatrical element to it; and fourth, resistance global justice, which foregrounds agency and insists on an internationalism of solidarity. The tactics can be utilised for different struggles at different times – but they all share the same strategy: anti-imperialism built on internationalism and solidarity.

Why is it unremarkable for the prosecutor of the world’s first permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) to be described as a salesman? Why does it appear normal for the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, Benjamin Ferencz, to use marketing terminology to state ‘my slogan has always been “law not war”’. Equally unremarkable is the claim of the second chief prosecutor of the ICC that ‘[t]he return on our investment for what others may today consider to be a huge cost for justice is effective deterrence and saving millions of victims’ lives’. And, it seems entirely ordinary – if rather comical – that a poster for a documentary on the ICC should depict a judge, the chief prosecutor, and the deputy prosecutor standing resolutely against a black background, half turned sideways to the viewer – a scene reminiscent of a movie poster of a John Grisham-meets-Goodfellas adaptation.

The development of global value chains (GVCs) in recent decades has transformed China into a global hub of manufacturing and assembly. Most of China’s exports to the USA are in the context of value chain trade. The deep participation of Chinese firms in GVCs has greatly promoted the rapid growth of Chinese exports to the USA, as well as China's trade surplus with the USA (which triggered the ongoing US-China trade war). Toward an understanding of the complexity of the bilateral trade imbalance, this chapter adopts the GVC perspective in its analysis of the success of China’s exports to the USA and of the persistent huge US trade deficit with China. It shows that conventional trade statistics seriously distort the bilateral trade imbalance by on the one hand exaggerating China’s surplus and on the other hand underestimating actual exports of the USA. In addition, the chapter discusses the impact of the trade war on China-centered GVCs and argues that it is impossible to hedge the risk of the punitive tariffs with the depreciation of the yuan. Shifting part of value chains out of China would be inevitable and the coronavirus pandemic would further strengthen the trend.

Does judicial interpretation of IIAs produce epistemic ‘authority’? Interpretation can mean both the process of finding out what texts mean and guidance to the concretisation of abstract general norms in individual instances. In the second sense, interpretation is subconsciously used to narrow the freedom of deciders; a range of interpretative tools is used to generate a quasi-formal unity of meaning across IIAs. Systemic integration is the most used and most potent tool. It enjoins us to assume that meanings are identical, but this is baseless: taking into account external rules could just as easily be the basis for a divergence. However, customary law is less certain and precise than assumed. From the perspective of peer-accepted reasoning-before-decision, the interpreter takes meanings, not external rules, into account. Arbitral tribunals in fact interpret IIAs in light not of a customary norm but of other investment tribunals’ understanding of the meaning of other treaty norms. On that perspective, there is no distinction between interpretative tools. Interpretation cannot unify investment law because it does not change the law, only certain brute facts.

This chapter analyses the freedom for tribunals to decide cases within the frame of possible meanings. It discusses tribunal arguments and holdings by analysing and structuring extant jurisprudence for three topics: the ‘substantial deprivation’ standard, the pre-eminent measure of the intensity of measures in modern case-law; the controversy over the possibility of partial expropriation; and the distinction between compensation under IIAs and reparation under the law of state responsibility.