What If Investment Law Served People, Not Profit?

Reimagining global rules from the ground up

Photo by on

I’m not writing this to tick a box or publish just another academic text. I’m writing because I believe investment law — often dismissed as dry, technical, and neutral — is in fact one of the most powerful forces shaping our global reality. It has long served the interests of capital and imperialism, entrenching systems of inequality and extraction. But I believe it can be reimagined as a tool for global justice rather than exploitation.

Why focus on investment law? Because it lies at the core of global exploitation — and it holds one of the keys to dismantling the imperial power structures that sustain it.

This raises urgent questions: How are capitalism and the ecological crisis connected? Who truly benefits from the relentless extraction of resources in the Global South? , Jason Hickel argued that the Global North — the so-called “Imperial Core” — is overwhelmingly responsible for the emissions and resource plunder driving ecological collapse. For Hickel, economic democracy and sovereignty in the Global South are essential to undoing the colonial power dynamics at the root of both climate breakdown and imperial domination.