Foreign investment screening: Between empire, capital, and the climate crisis

Abstract

In dialogue with responses to my article on the ongoing multiplication of foreign investment screening mechanisms, this intervention offers a historical sketch and a conceptual framework tracing the formation of legal regimes of investment control in the dialectics of empire and capital. In a world of climate collapse and realignments in the imperialist hierarchy of global capitalism, rival powers may well increasingly use the law to selectively include/exclude foreign investment within their national spaces of accumulation, but also to aggressively shape legal geographies of investment regulations in developing countries and beyond.