Last week Lori Wallach, Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, joined me at CFR for a rare on the record roundtable meeting. Living up to her reputation for incisive and provocative remarks, Wallach sparked a heated debate about the impacts of investment treaties in the global south. She argued that Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs), which aim to protect foreign investors from unfair and arbitrary treatment by governments, are themselves arbitrary and unfair.

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On Tuesday the Supreme Court ruled that victims of torture, arbitrary executions, and other human rights abuses in foreign countries could not seek justice in U.S. courts. The ruling in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum halted a widely watched case brought by a group of Nigerians, which alleged that in the 1990s Shell Oil was complicit in the torture and murder of protesters at the company’s operations in the impoverished but oil rich Ogoni region. The Supreme Court held unanimously that the “presumption against extraterritoriality” applies to Alien Tort Statute cases, meaning that foreigners cannot use U.S. courts to seek justice against foreigners for crimes committed on the soil and in the territory of foreign nations.

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In a recent interview, Goldman Sachs’ Jim O’Neill, whose pen gave birth to the concept of the BRICs—the constellation of emerging economic powers Brazil, Russia, India, and China (and now including South Africa)—said the countries’ combined growth had “exceeded all expectations.”  Noted O’Neill, “in slightly over a decade the group’s GDP has grown from approximately $3 billion to $13 billion. The BRIC countries have the potential to avert a global recession and to grow faster than the rest of the world and to pull all of us along with them as a (growth) engine.”

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Much attention has been devoted to Afghanistan’s upcoming political and security transition, with Secretary of State John Kerry arriving in Kabul today for meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But one critical piece of the stability equation has been largely overlooked to date: economic transition. As 2014 approaches, a great deal of progress will either be built upon or lost.

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Counter-intuitively, economic growth (a prerequisite for reducing poverty in the world’s poorest countries) and the well-being of the worst-off and most vulnerable populations are often at odds in the developing world. This tension between poverty, equity, and economic growth is most visibly salient in disputes over land—a key resource for the food security and livelihoods of the poor, but also an essential resource for growth-enhancing investments in energy production and industrial manufacturing. Simmering land disputes that pit growth against equity roil just beneath the surface in many countries; just this past week, these conflicts have boiled over for different reasons across continents, from Kenya to China to Myanmar.

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This week on his blog, CFR senior fellow John Campbell has highlighted two major African concerns: resource wealth and immunization. He first explores the question of what is happening to the income generated by Zimbabwe’s Marange diamond fields. As he writes: Read more »

Today on his blog, CFR senior fellow John Campbell analyzes the Dutch court decision absolving Royal Dutch Shell of liability for four oil spills in Nigeria. As he explains: Read more »

Yesterday on CFR’s Asia Unbound blog, CFR fellow Joshua Kurlantzick suggested that resource nationalism could threaten Indonesia’s economic development. As he argues: Read more »