Mona’s research broadly focuses on the global economy and its legal structures and institutions. She is interested in doctrinal and interdisciplinary approaches to international trade and foreign investment law and policy, particularly global economic history, the politics of international law, economic diplomacy, and law and empire. Mona also has wider interests in security studies, international development, and global governance.
She is currently completing a monograph (under contract with Oxford University Press) on the ‘fair and equitable treatment’ (FET) treaty standard, the most litigated and most controversial aspect of international investment law. It is based on five years of original archival research in the UK, France, Canada, the US, and Switzerland. In this comprehensive history of FET, Mona explains how this contested nature has been present from its earliest design in international trade and investment treaties. In fact, she shows that FET has always meant many different things to different people, and both state and non-state actors have strategically sought to shape the legal understanding of FET to advance their own particular interests and ideas.
Other research projects include: multilateralism and other processes for global economic governance, dialogue among the academy, domestic stakeholders, and nation states regarding both the creation and subsequent reform of investor-state arbitration, the underappreciated impact of the international development community on the construction of international economic governance institutions, and the rising demand for national security strategies that address the regulation of digital technologies in the global economy.