With the removal of boundaries and consequent flourishing of free trade and commerce, arbitration has become the most important method of dispute resolution in international transactions. Bolstered by international conventions, arbitration is now seen as more effective than litigation before a national court. Commercial arbitration, whether national or international, has different features when compared to litigation in ordinary courts. It enables the parties to exercise a high degree of control over the proceedings, terms of reference and composition of the tribunal. In its role as an alternative to national courts, arbitration has proved to be considerably successful. Parties entering into economic agreements often include arbitration clauses in their contracts to ensure that any dispute can be resolved without recourse to expensive and time-consuming litigation. The significance of the study of commercial arbitration, especially international commercial arbitration, lies in the fact that in the contemporary world of changing economic dimensions, it has become a sophisticated mechanism for consensually dealing with international disputes. Beyond its practical importance, international arbitration is worthy of attention because it involves a framework of international rules and institutions. With remarkable success, this provides a fair, neutral, expert, durable and efficient means for resolving difficult transactional problems. These rules have evolved over time in multiple countries through the joint efforts of governments and large corporations. The driving and dominant force of international commercial arbitration comes from a number of factors.

That the decade of untrammelled power Narendra Modi enjoyed before losing his majority in his 2024 victory so humiliatingly represented a new phase in the ruinous advance of Hindutva is clear. What is less clear is where the novelty lies. For some, it lies in the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) parliamentary majority, the first for any party since 1984; the centrality of Modi's personality; and the combination of populism, nationalism, majoritarianism, and authoritarianism (Chatterji, Hansen, and Jaffrelot 2019, p. 1). For others, it lies in the Modi regime being a ‘governmental formation with considerable institutional heft that converges with wider global currents and enjoys an unprecedented level of mainstream acceptance’ (Hansen and Roy 2022, p. 1).

These assessments appear staggeringly placid. Under the Modi regime, minorities—Muslims throughout India, Christians in the north-east and Adivasi lands—and dissident intellectuals are systematically persecuted, often to death; working people are assailed by wilfully brutish experiments—demonetization and draconian COVID-19 lockdowns to take the most egregious—leaving lasting damage. Meanwhile, the topmost corporate capitalist class rejoices in sympathetic legislation, light oversight (if any), and aid in foreign operations. To get power and keep it, the government displays ‘unprecedented’ and ‘sweeping disregard for the constitution’, particularly its federalism (Savera 2019), and razes political institutions—the Supreme Court, the Central Vigilance Commission, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)—with the bulldozer of its parliamentary majority.

Motivated by the advantages of arbitration over ordinary litigation before the domestic courts, countries across the world have started to reach a consensus to ensure uniform principles for the recognition and enforcement of arbitral awards under the guidance of the UNCITRAL. At the same time, it should be noted that the arbitration process is not free from certain inherent legal issues. Unlike domestic arbitration, international arbitration involves issues related to different countries. Generally, international arbitration rules permit the parties to choose the substantive law that will govern their disputes. The legality of the arbitral award mainly depends on the propriety of the law applied. A detailed study on the legality of arbitral awards and the scope of challenging awards based on legality is taken up in this chapter. The chapter further analyses the fairness of arbitral awards and the court's power to determine the validity of an arbitral award as regards its fairness. The illegality of arbitral awards as a ground for challenge mainly revolves around the issue of choice of law; which law is to be made applicable to the arbitration of a particular dispute has many a time become a serious question for arbitrators. A situation may arise when parties fail to agree on the law to be applied in an international commercial arbitration; then the tribunal will have to identify a law that suits the intention of the parties. The process of this choice presents a significant problem. Even when the parties have chosen a law for arbitrating their dispute, a question may arise as to whether the tribunal has made use of it properly. Here the problem of interpretation of the law will come into play.

Introduction

In an essay written some twenty-five years ago, Indian thinker Ashis Nandy describes popular Indian cinema as ‘the slum's point of view of Indian politics and society and, for that matter, the world’ (Nandy 1998, p. 2). The slum, a term for the urban lower-class settlements that constitute a significant portion of the landscape of every major Indian city, embodies the complexities of Indian society. It both aspires to and contrasts with the genteel urbanity of the upper-middle classes who are physically proximate to but separate from their slum-dwelling compatriots. The slum carries in it something of the rural and village worlds of migrants who make their home in it. It represents the profound social dislocation and alienation wrought by Indian modernity upon large sections of its population as well as new kinds of social relations that emerge as a result of these shifts and disruption. A physical space inhabited by Indian lower-middle classes and emerging middle classes but also a symbol of their aspirations, the slum is the beating heart of Indian political life. Nandy argues that the ‘passions of, and the self-expressions identified with, the lower-middle class—for that matter, the middle class as a whole—now constitute the ideological locus of Indian politics’ (ibid., p. 6). Inasmuch as it is a kaleidoscopic portrayal of the universe of the slum, Indian popular cinema, then, far from being an escapist fantasy or irrelevant lowbrow art, is an essential cultural form encapsulating the central concerns of Indian political and social life.

Writing over a century ago, Vladimir Lenin had talked of finance capital as the ‘coalescence of bank and industrial capital’ and of a financial oligarchy presiding over this capital that sat on the boards of directors of both banks and industrial establishments. But Lenin's concepts were located in the context of an inter-imperialist rivalry, where the finance capitals and financial oligarchies of different advanced capitalist countries were both country-based and engaged in conflict with their counterparts in other advanced capitalist countries over the acquisition of ‘economic territory’ (Lenin 1976).

Contemporary capitalism, however, is characterized by a muting of inter-imperialist rivalry. This muting is rooted, not in any agreement among capitalist powers to divide the world peacefully (as Karl Kautsky had visualized in what is called ‘ultra-imperialism’) but in the formation of an international finance capital, which is not essentially country-based and which, far from wanting to divide the world into different spheres of influence, actually wants to remove all such divisions so that it can move freely across the globe. Contemporary finance capital, therefore, is globalized (that is, international); it is not part of any national imperialist strategy, as it had been in Lenin's time; and it is employed not just in industrial production but also in rampant speculation that has given rise to several asset-price bubbles.

Every 5 years, the World Congress of the Econometric Society brings together scholars from around the world. Leading scholars present state-of-the-art overviews of their areas of research, offering newcomers access to key research in economics. Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Twelfth World Congress consists of papers and commentaries presented at the Twelfth World Congress of the Econometric Society. This two-volume set includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussions of future directions for a variety of topics, covering both theory and application. The first volume addresses such topics as contract theory, industrial organization, health and human capital, as well as racial justice, while the second volume includes theoretical and applied papers on climate change, time-series econometrics, and causal inference. These papers are invaluable for experienced economists seeking to broaden their knowledge or young economists new to the field.

State of the Art

Eurocentrism has long dominated historical scholarship on the First World War. Apart from the literature that explores the entry of the United States (US) into the conflict in 1917, research on the First World War has ignored, as Oliver Janz has pointed out, the war's global dimension(s). During the last years, however, research into the history of the First World War has witnessed a global turn. Fuelled by the war's 100-year commemoration, First World War studies have been expanded both spatially and content-wise. The entanglement of the world war with non-European conflicts, the war's transition into a worldwide economic battle, and the complex ramifications it has had on all world regions have since then become topics explored by historians of the First World War. This research has developed such that the First World War is now understood as a moment of global mobility that caused mass movements of people across national borders, including soldiers, prisoners of war, labour forces, refugees and displaced people. Humanitarian initiatives and organisations, which tried to alleviate the war-caused suffering of the people, are part of the history of these mass movements.

In response to the circulation of news items and publicity campaigns that depicted the suffering of people in other parts of the globe, a myriad of local, regional and national aid committees were established from the outset of the conflict in Europe in August 1914. The activities of these committees often became integrated into border-transcending support networks of global reach.

In his powerful poem titled ‘Shema’, Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, urges the world to pay attention to the victims of the Holocaust and to never lose sight of the human monstrosity that unfolded under fascism. Despite Levi's warning, there is a global resurgence of fascism (Mason 2021; Patnaik 2024; Stanley 2020). India seems to be in a similar situation with its embrace of fascism in the form of Hindutva. Fascism is a state of capitalism that arises because of a crisis or its possibility in which the traditional elite cannot dominate the political sphere and serve the interests of large corporations through liberal institutions (Poulantzas 2018). It is an authoritarian reaction (Desai 2016; Patnaik 2024) and a capitalist counter-revolution wearing a popular mask (Parenti 1997; Rosenberg 2016).