"International law on sovereign defaults is underdeveloped because States have largely refrained from adjudicating disputes arising out of public debt. The looming new wave of sovereign defaults is likely to shift dispute resolution away from national courts to international tribunals and...

"There has been a considerable amount of recent writing in civil society, legal academia, among commercial lawyers, and in UN agencies and the World Bank about the doctrine of odious debt. The surge in interest arose after the fall of Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 2003, and the claims by senior...

The first two decades of the twenty-first century witnessed a series of large-scale sovereign defaults and debt restructurings, in which sovereigns struggled to negotiate with recalcitrant bondholders, particularly hedge funds. Also, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 heralded a bleak...