Monopoly broken? Investment governance beyond the sovereign state

My dissertation problematizes the state-centrism of the field of international relations (IR) by focusing on the widespread and longstanding departures from state-centric governance that have existed in the system, even after the consolidation of the sovereign state within Europe. Not only have sovereign states never properly monopolized governance in the international system as a whole, but in certain parts of the system there has persisted a significant degree of institutional heterogeneity that we neither properly acknowledge nor understand. In order to expose and redress this shortcoming of existing empirical and theoretical work in the field of IR, this dissertation focuses on a specific "slice" of the governance pie involving the legal and physical security of foreign direct investments. The project focuses on a micro-level analysis of institutions of investment governance to illuminate macro-level questions about the nature of units and locus of governance in the international system. With regard to the former, the investigation centers on the question of what causes variations in the institutional organization to provide security for foreign investments? In particular, why are the physical and legal protection of foreign investments sometimes governed by institutional arrangements at least partially external to the legal and coercive resources---i.e. local laws, courts, police and military---of the host polity?I first examine historic institutional arrangements for providing legal and physical protection of foreign investments into the non-Western world that did not rely primarily on the legal, adjudicative and coercive resources of host polities to govern foreign investments. Transnational and home state-based modalities of physical and legal investment governance have existed throughout history and by examining the circumstances under which different arrangements have emerged, the project sheds light on the current variation in the institutions of investment governance. The second part of the empirical analysis focuses on case studies of contemporary transnational and home state-based modalities of legal and physical investment protection, the circumstances under which they arise, the extent to which these are consistent with the factors that were key in the historic analyses, and their implications for the sovereignty of host polities.