THE AUTHOR<\/strong>: Arbitration specialists often pride themselves on arbitration being the mechanism that holds when everything else gives way. It is the clause buried in a contract signed in better times, designed to outlast the deal itself. But what happens when the ground shifts not only beneath the parties but beneath the entire legal and economic order in which those contracts were made?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the question behind the next edition of the\u00a0Italian Arbitration Day (“IAD<\/strong>“)<\/a>, taking place on 11 June 2026 in Rome. This year\u2019s theme \u2014\u00a0Arbitration in the Age of Economic and Legal Disruption: Of Tariffs, Sanctions and Global Uncertainty<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 is not just timely, it is urgent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is obvious to point out that we are living through a period of deep disruption to the rules-based international order underpinning cross-border commerce and dispute resolution for decades. Unilateral tariff regimes, cascading sanctions programmes, and the fragmentation of global supply chains are not background noise. Not anymore. Maybe not ever. They are the defining features of the commercial landscape in which clients operate and in which arbitral tribunals are now being asked to adjudicate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Can arbitration remain a reliable anchor in a world that has lost its faith in multilateralism? Or are we witnessing something more troubling? Perhaps, the slow erosion of arbitration\u2019s foundational assumptions by the very forces it was designed to transcend? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the ones that should be in the back of our minds as we hear every session of this year\u2019s IAD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This piece is not a preview of what will be said in Rome. It is a provocation and an invitation to arrive in Rome with your assumptions already under examination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The conference opens with two keynote speeches that approach this year\u2019s theme from deliberately different vantage points. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Carlo Altomonte\u00a0<\/strong>is a Professor of Economics of European Integration at Bocconi University and a leading expert on international trade, globalisation, and geopolitical risk. He is a consultant to the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Central Bank, and a researcher whose career sits precisely at the intersection of economic analysis and political reality. What will an economist\u2019s account of the current disruption tell us that lawyers, trained to look for the applicable rule, have been missing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alain Pellet<\/a><\/strong><\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris Nanterre, a former Chair of the UN International Law Commission, and one of the most experienced counsel before the International Court of Justice<\/a> (\u201cICJ<\/strong>\u201d), with extensive experience in investment arbitration. What does the current unravelling of multilateral norms look like to someone who has spent a career building and defending the international legal order from the inside?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two professors, two disciplines, one theme. The juxtaposition can only be intentional, and the dialogue between these perspectives will set the tone for everything that follows. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What questions will they pose? What frameworks will they bring? That remains to be seen, and that anticipation is part of what makes this format so valuable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The morning session opens with a question that is more fundamental than it might first appear: what kinds of disputes are we actually looking at? Before reaching for procedural or remedial answers, the nature, volume, and legal character of the disputes emerging from this environment deserve careful examination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tariffs are not just about trade policy. When a government imposes sudden, sweeping import duties, they tear through existing commercial arrangements in ways that immediately raise contractual questions. Force majeure clauses, hardship provisions, material adverse change thresholds: these once-dormant drafting choices become live battlegrounds. Who drafted them well? Who did not? And what happens when no drafting can adequately capture an intervention of this scale and speed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sanctions regimes present a related but distinct challenge. Unlike tariffs, sanctions often operate as overnight prohibitions. Contracts that were lawful and performable at the time of signing suddenly become non-performable. Not because of anything the contracting parties did, but because of a political decision taken in Washington, Brussels, London, or anywhere else in the world. The question of who bears that risk, and how arbitral tribunals should approach it, is far from settled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then there is what might be called the broader register of global uncertainty. The type of disruption that cannot be attributed to any single tariff measure or sanctions list, but arises from the collapse of the predictive frameworks on which international commercial planning depends. Supply chains designed around decades of stable trade relationships that must be reorganised. Investment strategies built on assumptions about regulatory environments that must be rewritten. The disputes that follow will often not fit neatly into existing legal categories. Tribunals that are asked to assess long, contested, and deeply politicised causation chains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What makes these disputes particularly interesting, and particularly difficult, is that they sit at the intersection of private law and public law. Tribunals are being asked to adjudicate private commercial consequences of public regulatory choices. This becomes clear in investment arbitration: investors are invoking treaty protections against the very measures that states argue are necessary responses to geopolitical emergencies. Let me be clear: this is not a hypothetical horizon.\u00a0Mikhail Maratovich<\/em> Fridman v. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg <\/em>(PCA Case No. 2025-42)<\/a> and the more recent Euroclear<\/em> case in Brussels<\/a> make for good examples. We have seen a preview of this in energy transition disputes, but the wave building now may be on a whole different scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The due process dimension is also emerging as a serious concern, and one that cuts to the heart of arbitration\u2019s legitimacy. Sanctions regimes routinely freeze the assets of designated parties. A sanctioned party to an arbitration may find itself unable to pay counsel, fund experts, or otherwise mount a meaningful defence. If one party is effectively excluded from meaningful participation under a sanction\u2019<\/ins>s regime, the integrity of any resulting award may be compromised. What then? Should tribunals suspend proceedings? Bifurcate? Accept non-participation as a waiver? Each option carries costs that the arbitration community has not yet fully confronted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the morning asks what disputes are coming, the afternoon asks what arbitration can actually do about them. This is where the stabiliser thesis faces its hardest test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The classic appeal of arbitration rests partly on its enforcement architecture. The New York Convention (1958)<\/a> provides a near-universal framework for the recognition and enforcement of awards, and for several decades, it has functioned with remarkable reliability. But enforcement is also dependent on the willingness of states and domestic courts to give effect to awards, and that willingness is not unconditional. Cases like the collision between treaty enforcement obligations and EU sanctions compliance, for example, have placed national courts in the position of choosing between two competing sets of legal obligations. There is no clean resolution, and the implications for the enforcement architecture\u2019s reliability are significant and certainly worth discussing.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is also a deeper question about compensation as a remedy. In a period of structural disruption, where the underlying commercial relationship may itself need to be renegotiated rather than litigated, is a damages award always the right answer? Adaptation, renegotiation facilitation, phased compensation\u2026 these may not be the traditional vocabulary of international arbitration, but should they?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the sanctions arena, some of the responses found may be instructive, but ultimately raise as many questions as they answer. It is no news that leading arbitral institutions, for instance, have adapted their fee structures so that proceedings involving sanctioned parties are conducted in euros rather than US dollars. A solution that, at the same time, allows proceedings to continue and shield the administration of the case from the extraterritorial reach of US sanctions law. This is a pragmatic solution. But is it a durable one? Does restructuring the \u201cplumbing\u201d of arbitration around sanctions signal resilience, or does it suggest that universalist ambitions are too dependent on geopolitical tolerance?<\/p>\n\n\n\n From that, emerges a related structural question about the gradual localisation of arbitral institutions along regional and national lines. The ICC (International Chamber of Commerce)<\/a><\/a>\u00a0established a dedicated office in S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil, in 2018 and introduced a fee scale denominated in Brazilian reais. A decision likely driven by multiple factors, including currency controls, regulatory preferences, and a genuine commercial case for proximity to a major, growing arbitration market. Other institutions have responded similarly to pressures in the Gulf, in Asia, and across Latin America. We see arbitral institutions investing in this healthy diversification purpose all the time, bringing arbitration closer to the parties who use it. But is that also a sign of a fragmentation that will gradually erode the coherence and cross-border predictability that make international arbitration worth choosing in the first place? Could it, paradoxically, be both a part of the answer to making arbitration more resilient, while also reflecting a need for fragmentation and localisation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are no easy answers to the IAD\u2019s programme. That is precisely the point. The IAD has always been a forum for rigorous engagement with the questions our field would sometimes rather not ask. This year, that ambition feels more necessary than ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the IAD\u2019s most distinctive features, and one that sets it apart from the standard conference format, is the Reverse Debate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than a traditional adversarial exchange between panellists, the Reverse Debaters turn the room itself into the arena, directing questions and provocations at the audience and inviting participants to defend positions in real time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This year, Valentine Chessa<\/a><\/strong> will conduct the morning Reverse Debate, and Gabriele Ruscalla<\/a><\/strong> the afternoon. The format is designed to take the conversation outside the comfort zone of structured presentations and into the territory of genuine, spontaneous engagement. Bringing instinct and judgement to a field so often dominated by doctrine is what makes this panel so innovative and, in all honesty, a personal favourite of mine from previous editions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Given this year\u2019s subject matter, we can expect the Reverse Debates to land on genuinely contested points. Come ready to engage and curious about where the room will go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A final note: something is fitting about this edition taking place in Rome, in the Sala della Protomoteca of the Campidoglio. This is a room dedicated to preserving the legacy of great minds across disciplines, inside the world\u2019s oldest continuously functioning seat of municipal government, overlooking the ruins of the very empire whose legal framework underpins Western law. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For a conference asking whether the international legal order can survive disruption, the setting could not carry more real symbolic weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Following the conference, a detailed report analysing the key discussions, arguments, and practical insights shared during the event will be published on Daily Jus<\/a>. The pre-conference paper is, by design, a provocation. The post-conference piece will be a reckoning.<\/em> Stay tuned for its publication.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Raquel Macedo Moreira<\/a>,<\/strong> Independent Practitioner, Research Associate & Lecturer<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nSetting the Frame: Two Perspectives, One Question<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Panel I \u2014 What Disputes?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Panel II \u2014 What Remedies?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Reverse Debate<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Before the curtains close <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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