Gates Cambridge profile
Rules shape everything: what you wear, what you eat, the planes you fly in. Thousands of people must cooperate under shared rules for any of this to work. We rely on these norms to produce a coherent whole, like a machine that takes behaviour as input and returns a verdict: legal or illegal.
This engine runs on binary code, classifying the world into dualities: public and private, sovereign and subject, land and sea, crime and punishment, war and peace.
But sometimes it produces a result that cannot be traced back to its own logic. A conclusion that breaks free from the premises on which it was built. I research these moments of rupture, where international law loops back on itself, contradicts its own foundations, and escapes the very rules it claims to impose. From oil investment contracts in the 1960s Middle East, to the ownership of cyberspace; from Imperial Japan’s Mandate over the South Pacific, to the race for wealth in outer space; from AI-powered killer robots to private armies, the humanitarian fallout of 9/11, or the fight for the rights of nature itself, I trace these paradoxes.
I search for a theory of law that insists on negating itself.
The Cultural Theory of Investment Claims
This research rethinks investor-state arbitration by looking not at what states do, but at how investors see. What if Investment Arbitration is a ritual, resonant with some cultures, yet alien to others?
Drawing from sociology, anthropology, cognitive sciences, I proposed the Cultural Theory of Investment Claims. It centres on a measurable variable: whether a society constructs the self as independent or interdependent. This distinction, between the “I” and the “we”, affects how investors perceive causality, assign blame, predict outcomes, and tolerate conflict.
Testing this against over 1100 real-world cases revealed a pattern. Even controlling for wealth and politics, a nation’s individualism score strongly predicts its investors’ tendency to arbitrate. The result: the top 10% most individualist countries hold nearly half of all investment claims filed. The top 10% most collectivist? Less than 1%.
It suggests investors aren’t just homus economicus. Echoing Clifford Gertz, they operate within "webs of significance they themselves have spun," and understanding those webs changes what we thought we knew about why they fight.
Subject of a presentation
A lot of my work focuses on government contracts and public procurement, trying to understand how international rules and practices interact with state activities. Are they compatible? I look into the practicalities.
I’ve also dedicated myself to understand Brazil and Latin America. How has arbitration with these states developed? What are the effects of Brazil's new Government Contracts Act on settling disputes, whether through formal arbitration or other non-judicial methods? This involved tracing the evolution from earlier thinking to the current law and assessing whether the Brazilian model effectively protects investors. Part of this includes examining ideas like the BRAMIA model as a potential alternative to traditional ISDS.
Beyond the specifics of Brazil or the CISG, I also look at the bigger picture. This includes detailed analysis of investor-state cases like Chemtura v. Canada and asking practical questions about efficiency: can arbitration genuinely improve the management of government contracts, and if so, how and when does it work best?