Abstract

This thesis explores the governance implications that historically accompanied arbitration between private and public entities – private-public arbitration (PPA). Modern international legal literature has increasingly started to view the most prominent present-day iteration of PPA – investment-treaty arbitration – as not just a mode of dispute resolution but as an important vehicle of (global) governance. Overwhelmingly, this realization has been accompanied by an assumption that this is a revolutionary development that significantly departs from previous practice. Consequently, despite the burgeoning scholarship on investment-treaty arbitration’s governance role, scholarly interest into whether other modalities of PPA historically operated as a mode of governance, prior to the advent of investment-treaty arbitration, has been lacking.