Is the geography of international arbitration shifting? Over the last decade, academics and practitioners have tried to map the terrain. In 2024 the Swiss-British academic initiative Arbitration Lab began releasing an annual World Arbitration Caseload to track “case trends across major global arbitral institutions.” The law firm Reed Smith also frequently releases reports to inform clients, including multijurisdictional analyses on challenges and caseloads as well as more focused regional reports, such as on Latin America, as do other firms. And for the last 14 years, Queen Mary’s School of Arbitration and the law firm White & Case have partnered on a large-scale survey on the state of arbitration, which, among other things, asks where arbitration is happening around the world and why.
“The widening and ‘flattening’ of international arbitration—more seats, more institutions, more diverse participants—is one of the most important developments of the past decade,” says Catherine Rogers, a professor at Bocconi University and a leading academic studying international arbitration. “But, it’s almost impossible to capture statistically or empirically.”
In this story, we explore what looking at the geography of international arbitration reveals about the field, why its movement is difficult to capture, and what’s happening as this alternative dispute-resolution method explodes in use. Indeed, as we will show, mapping the field means more than the physical location; as Rogers states, it’s “more seats, more institutions, more diverse participants.”
Inside the arbitration clause
When talking about mapping international arbitration, it’s critical to understand some of its parts:
- The arbitral institution is the body that administers the dispute and establishes the rules the parties will follow—for example, the London Court of International Arbitration [LCIA] or the Singapore International Arbitration Centre [SIAC]). The institution can appoint arbitrators with the parties as well as make decisions if such arbitrators are challenged, but has no substantive powers.
- The seat of the dispute (its “legal home”)—its national law and courts provide ultimate supervision and enforcement, if necessary.
- The substantive law of the contract.
- The language the arbitration will take place in.
If, on the surface, this seems baseline for any good agreement, consider this: all four of these components might be different. For all the importance of the seat, neither the institution nor the hearings are necessarily there, and the arbitrators do not need to be there. The home jurisdictions of each party can also play a role.
What goes into making choices as to seat, institution, and so on? When party A initiates a dispute against party B, one of the first actions they take is to look back at their original contract, where key details regarding dispute resolution may or may not be all spelled out. According to Chiann Bao, an independent arbitrator based in Singapore, parties do not always spend much time negotiating the arbitration clause, despite efforts from dispute-resolution law firm practitioners. “It is often in the template [contract],” she says. “The party with the stronger bargaining power will often initiate the negotiations by sending over their contract and focus on the essential terms—quantity, the quality, the price. Rarely is the dispute resolution clause a topic of negotiation.”
Should anything go awry in the arbitral process, you need to have a reliable court system capable of providing effective support.
Miljana Bigović, president, Harvard International Arbitration Law Students Association
Indeed, when the contract is signed, “they are not adversaries; they’re business partners,” says Rogers. But disputes happen—“especially in industries that more regularly encounter disputes like mining or infrastructure,” says Bao—and there are certain aspects of an arbitration clause that can be of some consequence, especially when it comes to the supervisory oversight of national courts in arbitration as well as enforcement.
Why is the seat important? “It’s because you want to have a jurisdiction that has a well-functioning judiciary. Should anything go awry in the arbitral process, you need to have a reliable court system capable of providing effective support,” says Miljana Bigović, an LL.M. candidate at Harvard Law School, the president of the Harvard International Arbitration Law Students Association, and a lawyer with years of arbitration experience across Europe. The Delos Guide to International Arbitration Places (GAP) rates what it calls “safe seats” each year, using six criteria—law, judiciary, legal expertise, right of representation, accessibility and safety, and ethics—to provide a traffic light assessment of green, yellow, and red to roughly 40 cities around the world.
Neutrality is also important, and it can depend on where the parties are, Bao says. “If you are a U.S. company in dispute with a Zambian company, where’s your starting point?” she asks. “You’ll know that each side will not want to go to the other home court system. In this case, the Zambian company won’t want the seat to be in the United States. And the American company won’t want it in Zambia,” she explains. Rogers says, “It’s usually not a good idea to choose a jurisdiction that either party is from.” Maybe they look to London or Geneva? “Those are third jurisdictions—neutral with reliable court systems,” says Bao. Beyond that, Bao adds, it is important to consider whether the country has signed on to the New York Convention, the international treaty that governs the recognition and enforcement of arbitration awards, which ensures that any award that is rendered in that seat can be enforced in the courts of the other signatories to the New York Convention. (As of today, 172 countries have signed the New York Convention.)
When an arbitral award is decided, a losing party has the option to seek to annul or vacate the award. Under the New York Convention and most modern arbitration laws, courts cannot review the award on its merits, explains Rogers. They can review the award only if something has procedurally gone “drastically, drastically wrong.” Otherwise, a country that has signed the New York Convention requires local courts to recognize an arbitral award as a local judgment. “The way I think of it visually is it’s like the court puts a cover sheet on the papers that says, ‘This is a court judgment’ and staples that on top of the award,” says Rogers.
Likewise, arbitration clauses specify the institution to support and administer the arbitration and the arbitrators itself. Each institution has its own rules and fees. “You really want to think about both time and cost,” Bigović says. Disputes can take a long time, and certain institutions like Singapore have expedited procedures that parties might try to take advantage of to move things along.
Moreover, “when you think about cost, you should not overlook the fees of your legal team,” Bigović says. “If you choose a particular governing law, you’ll usually need counsel who are qualified in that specific system.” Take an LCIA arbitration in London: the LCIA itself is affordable as an institution, says Bigović. What can increase the overall cost, however, is if English law governs not only the procedure but also the underlying contract, which may require engaging English practitioners and, for the hearing, potentially barristers. “Those additional layers of expertise can make the process more expensive,” she says. These are all factors that need to be considered in arbitration decision-making.
Mapping the data
When Queen Mary and White & Case unveiled this year’s arbitration survey, the survey demonstrated a shift in the preferred geography of arbitration. Since researchers first began conducting the survey, European destinations like London and Paris (for the seat) and LCIA and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) (for the institution) have been popular. But in 2025, the survey noted, “an interviewee suggested ‘arbitration is moving east.’” Hong Kong and Singapore have held high positions in the top five seats for a number of years, but from 2021 to 2025, according to the data, Geneva fell off the top five, Beijing came in fourth, and Shenzhen moved up to tie with Paris at fifth. The survey also went more granular, looking at seats preferred by regional users, demonstrating which seats are popular internationally and which might be preferred by particular subsets.
What motivates seat preference? “The message from respondents is that consistency is key when assessing how attractive they find a seat,” the survey notes. “Users want to be sure that they will get what they expect when they choose where to arbitrate their disputes.”
On a methodological level, however, surveys by definition rely on voluntary respondents, not an actual counting of cases or assessment of performance. For the 2025 edition, Queen Mary and White & Case received 2,402 responses over about two months. Of the responses, 47 percent practiced primarily in Asia-Pacific, 21 percent in Europe, 10 percent in North America, 9 percent in the Middle East, 7 percent in the Caribbean/Latin America, and 6 percent in Africa. The team also conducted qualitative interviews to add further context to the data.
Indeed, other sources map the data differently, for instance, by comparing how institutions report caseloads. Reed Smith’s comparative insights into six of the top institutions—the ICC, the LCIA, the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre, the SIAC, the Dubai International Arbitration Centre, and the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (based in New York)—look at which cases are showing up in which arbitral hubs by seat and by industry.
With any type of methodology, it may be difficult to compare top seats overall, but one can analyze which seats are top for each institution. For instance, the Reed Smith authors explain, summing up their own report: “London, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York and Paris remain dominant arbitral hubs, while the United Arab Emirates (UAE) broke into ICC’s top five seats for the first time, confirming the growing importance of GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] and the wider Arab region for arbitration.”
Rogers looks more into market percentages, using the ICC statistics as an indicator that “one of the most striking recent indicators of changing demand is Latin America’s increasing caseload share in global institutional arbitration,” she says. “For example, in the ICC’s 2024 statistics, parties from Latin America and the Caribbean rose to 21.4 percent of parties in ICC cases, up 14.5 percent the prior year.” The numbers do not capture everything, and regionally prominent institutions are often overlooked in global calculations. For example, according to Rogers, “CAM-CCBC in Brazil has emerged as a globally recognized institution, both in terms of reputation and growing caseloads.”
[New local arbitral institutions] are all doing an admirable job of sowing seeds of understanding in their home microcosm.
Chiann Bao, independent arbitrator
The Arbitration Lab, likewise, compared the top 20 institutions for 2025, documenting a growth in total cases across five different Chinese arbitration centers, and stating: “While most arbitral institutions experienced a decline in total cases, the combined number of arbitrated cases has grown, primarily thanks to Chinese institutions.” Further, amendments to China’s arbitration laws debuted in late 2025, which will open up the Chinese market to foreign arbitral institutions as well as formally recognize the concept of “seat,” which was not “expressly distinguish[ed]” from the “location of the arbitral institution” in Chinese law until now, according to Paul Hastings.
Some potential change has likewise come from geopolitical tension. For instance, Bigović, who was based in Stockholm previously, says that the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce (SCC) first became a leading arbitral institution during the Cold War. Prior to the war in Ukraine and Sweden joining NATO, “East-West disputes used to be resolved before the SCC on a regular basis,” she says, as the institution was viewed as “a genuinely neutral venue, thanks to the 1977 Optional Clause Agreement allowing for U.S.-Soviet commercial disputes to be resolved in Sweden.” In the last couple years, however, Bigović sees Russian parties opting more for places like Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong. “It appears that a number of Eastern European users are reassessing which jurisdiction might function as an appropriate neutral venue,” she says. At the same time, Bigović points out that the SCC has reported a record number of cases over the past two years, suggesting that activity remains robust despite these shifts.
But is the market shifting? Or simply growing? “I think there are more disputes going to arbitration thanks to the incredible work of the arbitral institutions around the world educating and training companies and law firms on arbitration,” says Bao. Opting for alternative dispute resolution, after all, can mean a more flexible and efficient process with more options for procedural control. “Naturally, institutional arbitration is therefore growing, leading to better recordkeeping of arbitration matters around the world,” Bao adds. But what else is going on? She continues:
There are also more local and regional institutions being born. You go to Africa and you have the Kigali International Arbitration Centre and the Lusaka International Arbitration Centre. They are all doing an admirable job of sowing seeds of understanding in their home microcosm. That, in turn, gives companies and the legal community there the understanding and the awareness that arbitration is a tool that can be used.
Emerging institutions
It is hard to quantify how much choosing an institution is swayed by public relations strategy, word of mouth, or cost in this small yet elite arbitration market.
Choosing an institution can mean choosing an arbitral experience. “Institutions are not all funded and structured in the same way,” Bao explains. In turn, she says, there may be variability in quality of administration service and robustness in promotion of the institution.
Many of the flagship arbitral institutions have worked to promote themselves around the world. For instance, a Thomson Reuters article, “The Challenges and Opportunities of Arbitrating in Africa,” explains that both the LCIA and ICC “expanded their presence in Africa through dedicated regional commissions and user councils.” This shows up in the caseload data. The Thomson Reuters authors write, “The 2024 Annual Casework Report of the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA), for example, noted that parties from Africa represented the second-highest proportion of parties in LCIA arbitrations and made up a higher percentage of the LCIA’s caseload than parties from the United Kingdom.”
An institution is really a physical manifestation of a jurisdiction’s lawyers and commercial community’s commitment to international arbitration.
Catherine Rogers, professor, Bocconi University
As arbitration becomes more well-known as a tool, smaller regional arbitration centers are popping up around the globe for domestic—and hopefully later, international—arbitrations. “Almost every jurisdiction that’s commercially active and that’s signed on to the New York Convention wants to have an arbitration center,” Rogers says. Competition between institutions is robust, which Rogers calls “healthy in the sense that if one introduces a new innovation to be more efficient, the others have to follow,” she says. “The bigger institutions publish statistics. A lot of institutions don’t yet publish statistics.” What this means is that even if the ICC looks to have “lost market share,” says Rogers, “it’s very, very difficult to quantify because not all these smaller institutions publish statistics.”
For Rogers, who does capacity building around arbitration around the world, including in places like Georgia and Peru, the formation of an arbitration center is an important development. “An institution is really a physical manifestation of a jurisdiction’s lawyers and commercial community’s commitment to international arbitration,” she says. It’s often internationally minded lawyers who have done advanced degrees in other countries who return and want to signal to the world that their city is “open for business.” “They see arbitration as an opportunity,” Rogers says. Some of this is “arbitration tourism.” During long disputes, lawyers fill up hotel rooms, spend money in local shops, and invest in the city. Further, “if you have a corrupt court system, arbitration can actually be a better alternative,” Rogers says.
“Fifteen years ago when these regional centers were popping up more and more, there was a reaction from some of the super insiders, ‘Oh, we have perfectly good centers in Paris and London, and why would anyone trust these centers outside of the main players?’” Rogers relays. She responds: “But actually a lot of these regional centers are very impressive.” An institution can bring in money from the government or investors. It can bring respect or opportunities to train judges and lawyers. It can bring clout. Moreover, “regional arbitration centers offer services tailored to that particular jurisdiction, aligning with local legal systems, business customs, and cultural expectations,” writes Reagan Powers in The Arbitration Brief.
Mapping the seats, institutions, and participants turns out, in the end, to be a much more complex endeavor than asking preferences or comparing caseloads. With more institutions emerging each year, the story may be less about a shift in any particular direction and more about a general growing awareness and use of arbitration as a powerful tool for disputes.
