Asian Arbitration Discourse

Research project for the years 2014/2015 within the programme ‘ITALY (Italian TALented Young researchers)’ – action 2

Title of the Research Project: Asian Arbitration Discourse (within the interdisciplinary programme ‘Asian Arbitration Law’)

Coordinator of the ‘Asian Arbitration Law’ project: Prof. Mariacarla GIORGETTI (Department di Law; Università degli Studi di Bergamo)

Coordinator of the ‘Asian Arbitration Discourse’ project: Prof. Maurizio GOTTI (Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Communication; Università degli Studi di Bergamo)

Aims of the Research Project

The ‘Asian Arbitration Discourse’ project is part of a larger programme on Asian Arbitration Law which involves several disciplines (civil trial law, English language, employment law, business economics).

As the topic is vast, this two-year project only takes into consideration the norms and arbitral practices in the main Asian countries, i.e. China, Japan and India. The topic of the research project is analysed from a juridical point of view, according to the perspectives of civil trial law, employment law, linguistic-textual analysis and business economics.

From the linguistic-textual point of view, the project analyses the norms and the main documents used in arbitration in the Asian countries taken into consideration and compares them with the discursive practices employed in Italy and in other countries of the European Union. The texts examined do not only consist of arbitral norms and awards, but also interviews with professionals in the field so as to gain direct insight into the linguistic and textual choices taken in the drafting of the documents specific to this profession.

In particular, we aim to verify the degree of independence of the practices used in the drafting of arbitral texts compared to the ones used in trials both of civil law and common law tradition.

We also want to assess the existence also in the Asian countries taken into consideration of a possible colonization of arbitral practices by those used in litigation, a phenomenon recently observed in alternative dispute resolution proceedings in several Western countries.

The research is carried out in collaboration with a team of the City University of Hong Kong (led by prof. Vijay Bhatia) who is investigating similar aspects of the linguistic-textual practices adopted in arbitration in Asian countries.