The insidious toxicity of investor-state arbitration Gabriel Resources vs Romania

Abstract

Looking at the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) case ‘Gabriel Resources vs Romania’, this paper documents the intangible losses, the chronic stress, and the damaged dignity of communities having to defend their livelihoods in the long-term ongoing conflicts over mineral resources. We expand the concept of environmental injustice as an ‘insidious’ form of toxicity ‘poisoning’ bodies even before chemical contamination, where the threat of ISDS is one of the many tools used by corporate power to reinforce itself. This paper answers scholarly calls for more empirical studies on the ISDS to expose the politics behind incommensurable valuation conflicts and justice as recognition. We analyse the ISDS case as part and parcel of the hegemonic extractivist logic of colonial power, capitalist accumulation by dispossession, and ontological occupation, which have left deep scars in the collective spaces of people imagining possible alternative futures.