International Commercial Arbitration Practices: A Discourse Analytical Study

Drawing on narrative, documentary and interactional data, this project will investigate the extent to which the integrity of arbitration principles is maintained in arbitration practice. The project will focus on the nature and the extent of the colonization of commercial arbitration practices by litigation practices in international contexts, and will explore the motivations for such an interdiscursive process. The evidence for the study will be derived from a number of integrated sources of data. These will include primary documentary data, such as previous relevant legal judgments and arbitration awards, appeals to written authorities, published outcomes of arbitration; supporting narrative and ethnographic data derived from interviews with expert participants in the arbitration process internationally focusing on critical moments in the arbitration process in key sites; complementary data derived from a discourse analytical identification of the significant communicative characteristics of such critical moments; and corroboration of such characteristics by sampled interactions of arbitration proceedings.