Storytelling is the magic ingredient for ensuring your messages make an impact and are remembered. But, to work well, stories require certain ingredients, including a classic narrative structure, jeopardy, pace and the use of character in telling them.

This chapter examines jeopardy objections, according to which intervention in nature should be prevented insofar as it will threaten other, more important values. Depending on the theory endorsed, these values vary, including the preservation of ecosystems or species (holism), living entities such as plants and other non-sentient organisms (biocentrism), or the “natural” and “the wilderness.” It argues that both holistic and biocentric views either rely on an irrational preference for the status quo or they build their case on implausible axiological assumptions that lead to unacceptable consequences for human interests. Finally, the so-called “natural,” understood as the result of evolution or as the natural wilderness, is revealed, at most, as possessing a kind of value that can be easily outweighed by that of nonhuman well-being. Appeals to the natural cannot in any case ground an opposition to helping wild animals across the board.

Theories about plot structure and the extent of their value. ‘The Seven Basic Plots’ (Christopher Booker). Five-act structure (Gustav Freytag). Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Tsvetan Todorov’s five stages of action. The inevitability of plot. Kenn Adams’s story spine. Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes. ‘Seeding’ conditions in order to make later events believable. The use of more than one timeframe. The risks inherent in confounding reader expectation.

‘You have a broad trajectory for your story when you start writing because you know the beginning and have a sense of an ending, but this trajectory will not be a straight line – the most direct journey from A to Z, where everything goes right, is the least interesting and probably not worth writing about.’

It is often claimed that investment arbitration is used as a means of last resort that occurs as a response to the realization of two types of shock towards foreign investors – one from severely dysfunctional governance at the national level and the other from an economic crisis. With an original dataset that includes investment claims filed under the rules of all arbitration institutions as well as ad hoc arbitrations, the authors test links between governance, economic crises and investment arbitration. They find that poor governance, understood as corruption and lack of rule of law, has a statistically significant relation with investment arbitration claims, but economic crises do not when considered separately. Yet, bad governance and economic crises considered together are a good predictor of when countries will get hit by investment arbitration claims. Their findings are of great significance to important questions regarding outcome legitimacy, in particular whether ISDS produces legitimate outcomes if used to redress or mitigate severe governance deficiencies, and whether its use in the context of economic crises hurts countries in great difficulty and thereby undermines efforts to arrive at mutually satisfactory solutions.