We have spilled much ink, we as a community, in our discussion of international arbitration. Much of it we have used on specific technical aspects of the laws and rules that apply to it, or that apply in it. A great deal too has gone to how good procedures are to be conducted. And increasingly, of late, we have written on how arbitration works beyond the rules – the rules which reflect some (but only some) of its true operations. We have taken interest in its broader social and economic significance. We are, now and then, zooming out from the bolts and screws and consider it at the level of an entire system. Engagements with problems that truly vex – truly vex beyond offering legal conundrums or presenting complicated logistical puzzles – no longer stand out today as so many sore thumbs. Or much less so.

Why? And where is it going? Why and how is international arbitration scholarship evolving? What are, to start with, its forms today? And why did we scholars make it what it is? Surely there is something – or rather many somethings – that determine what we write. What could they be?

These are the principal questions I seek to entertain in this chapter, which constitutes my report as research rapporteur for the conference celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Queen Mary School of International Arbitration. It is also, to be fair, part of a bigger project that tries to understand how the thinking about law more generally is produced.

To be clear I do not offer here an elaborate study in the sociology of professions. Nor do I attempt to engage in advanced considerations of what forms the arbitral epistemic community or communities, and what forces animate that community. These are or would be meaningful endeavours, but they are not mine. The outline I offer is of necessity a sketch; I merely want to map a few conventional types of arbitration scholarship and mark some of the possible places where interests can be found that incentivise or constraint research in the field. The ambition is that these types and these interests can inform our perspective when we ponder how the thinking about arbitration law and practice is produced. Accordingly, the propositions I formulate are submitted, in this essay, to rational assent, not to empirical demonstration. Possibly a research programme could be developed to test these propositions. But this is not the point of this essay. Its point is heuristic.

I believe there is an important general point about arbitration that comes from thinking in particular about how scholarship on arbitration is produced. The general point is about what is likely to become of arbitration, about the support it will garner, the pains that will be visited on it, and the changes and adaptations that will be required of it – required of it and of its participants and stakeholders. Arbitration is indeed a fairly technical field, a fairly complex area of the law. And so it often appears that political powers have difficulties in understanding its intricacies, let alone in developing a reliable understanding of their own, distinct from what our discourses showcase – this is the very idea of regulatory capture by an epistemic community. It seems credible, however, that these same political powers will have no difficult in forming an opinion about the allure of the consequences of sundry arbitral regimes, and if their understanding of either the causes or the consequences is muddled by unhelpful discourses, unhappy things are not unlikely to follow.

The chapter moves in four parts. I begin with an overview of different forms of arbitration scholarship, what they seek to achieve and how, what from of thinking they correspond to and how they progress, all of this in quite general terms. This part ends with an impressionist account of the evolution of arbitration scholarship over the last 30 years.

With Part II, I turn to what incentivises and constrains scholarship in the field. I first enter a general approach, which draws heavily on the concept of reasons-for-action, which I combine with basic law & economics tenets. I further introduce a classic distinction between two types of such reasons-for-action.

In Part III, I apply this general approach to identify ways in which the pursuit of other people’s interests may determine what kind of arbitration scholarship we produce. In Part IV, the focus shifts, within the same approach, to the advancement of our own interests when we write on arbitration.

A final clarification bears noting: my stance is not evaluative. The intent of my chapter is not to dwell on the virtues and demerits of arbitration scholarship, or even, as I already said, to supply evidence of what it is we really do. I simply offer, without much further adornment, a lens for everyone to look at arbitration scholarship from the vantage of their own search.

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