Master 2024/2025

Legal Issues of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)

Type: Elective course (Law of International Trade and Dispute Resolution)

Area of studies: Law

Delivered by: School of International Law

Where: Faculty of Law

When: 1 year, 3 module

Mode of studies: offline

Open to: students of all HSE University campuses

Instructors: Vladislav Starzhenetsky

Master’s programme: Law of International Trade and Dispute Resolution

Language: English

ECTS credits: 3

Course Syllabus

Abstract

A decade ago, the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) was enacted by the Chinese government, aiming to represent a global cooperation for developing infrastructure, enhancing regional connectivity, and further accelerating economic growth. Since the past ten years, the BRI has already welcomed 152 countries around the world to participate in, and has formed more than 200 cooperative documents. Compared to China’s previous efforts of opening-up and going-global, the BRIs is characterised by its endeavour of frameworking the undertakings and institutionalising them into certain mechanisms underpinned by legal instruments, both formal and informal. Accordingly, the legal aspect of the BRI should be paid more significance by both practitioners and scholars.This two-week teaching module would provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the relevant legal issues regarding the BRI. From a horizontal perspective, the proposed module covers a wide range of topics, including transnational trade, cross-border investment, and international financing. The law subject to exploration is triple-folded, namely: the law applicable to commercial relationships between private actors on an equal footing, the law governing regulatory relationships between a state and a market actor, as well as the law underpinning the coordinative relationships between different sovereign states. For each specific topic, the module first focuses on different kinds of instruments are employed under various BRI projects, and then go further as to discuss the questions as to how relevant norms of international economic law have been adopted or otherwise revised by BRI practices and to what extent the international economic order may be enhanced or otherwise reshaped by the implementation of the BRI.The course does not isolate itself from a wider ground of the international economic order whereby countries alongside the BRI have assumed profound and sophisticated international obligations under various bilateral, regional, and multilateral treaties. Therefore, more international legal instruments, as well as international adjudicative practices in different tribunals, will be explored and discussed in order to understand the compliance of BRI practices with various international economic regimes. The teaching module pays particular attention to the bilateral relationship between Russia and China, whereas stable and positive cooperation between the two major players of the world economy has increasingly shown its significant during a time of uncertainty resulting from protectionism and anti-globalisation movements.