Professor Donatella Alessandrini is a critical legal scholar whose research lies at the intersection of law and political economy, with a particular interest in the relationship between inter/national economic law and socio-economic inequalities.
She co-directs the LLM programme at Loughborough University, London, where she also acts as deputy Director of Research. She sits on the editorial boards of Law and Critique and feminists@law; and is a founding member of The IEL Collective, a community of scholars and practitioners interested in critical reflection on the interactions between law and the global economy. She is also a Senior Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.
Prior to joining Loughborough Law, she worked at the University of Kent.
Professor Alessandrini’s research lies at the intersection of law and political economy, with a particular interest in critical trade and development literature, feminist political economy, critical studies of value and valuation, and political theory. Her scholarship explores the role that international economic law and knowledge might play in creating, consolidating and potentially redressing socio-economic inequalities and planetary injustices.
Her earlier work has focused on the political economy of ‘development’ in multilateral trading relations, and has provided a sustained analysis of the contribution that trade and investment law have made to the proliferation of Global Value Chains (GVCs), and to the unequal distribution of the economic rewards produced along these networks.
She is currently working on two projects. The first interrogates the claims of International Economic Institutions about the developmental, environmental and gender equality potential of GVCs. In particular, it examines the role that legal knowledge and arrangements play in the production and unequal distribution of economic value between and within countries in which GVCs operate. It also aims to develop a conceptual framework that can adequately embrace productive and reproductive activities of workers and communities involved in GVCs.
The second project is concerned with exploring contemporary approaches to conceptual and normative understandings of the production of value in today’s financialised economies, and with imagining the possibility of institutional arrangements able to affect current processes of global value-making, with a focus on alternative labour, trade and finance-related arrangements.
Her research has been supported by The British Academy, Leverhulme and the ESRC.
Professor Alessandrini teaches international economic law with a focus on word trade and foreign investment law. Trade topics include differing theoretical approaches to trade liberalisation; the historic and institutional background of world trade law; the law of the World Trade Organisation and that of the main regional trade agreements; the relationship between trade liberalisation and development; the crisis of the multilateral trading system and alternative trade arrangements.
Other topics include the evolution of the relationship between trade law and environmental/climate, gender/intersectional, and labour justice issues; the regulation of trade and environmental goods and services; biodiversity and natural resources, and sustainability and equity in global value chain capitalism
Foreign investment law topics include investment regulation in colonial and post-colonial contexts; theoretical approaches to the relationship between foreign investment regulation and development; the relationship between domestic and international law on foreign investment; bilateral, regional and multilateral initiatives for foreign investment protection and regulation, including dispute settlement; and contemporary regulatory attempts to balance states’ right to regulate in the public interest with foreign investment protection.
Professor Alessandrini has supervised over 15 PhDs. She is happy to supervise research projects on International Economic Law (IEL) and knowledge production, IEL and racial capitalism, IEL and studies of value production and measurement; Law and Social reproduction, Critical Trade and Development (particularly work on global value chains, development and gender); Financial Capitalism and Social Reproduction; post-Fordism; and Feminist Political Economy.
- Mezzadri, A., Rai, S. M., Stevano, S., Alessandrini, D., Bargawi, H., Elias, J., Hassim, S., Kesar, S., Thiyaga Lingham, J., Natile, S. and others. (2025) ‘Pluralizing social reproduction approaches’, International Feminist Journal of Politics. Taylor & Francis. doi: 10.1080/14616742.2024.2447594.
- Alessandrini, D. (2022) ‘Global value chains, development and the long duree of trade and investment Law’, Leiden Journal of International Law. doi: 10.1017/S0922156522000255.
- Alessandrini, D. (2022) ‘A Not So “New Dawn” for International Economic Law and Development: Towards a Social Reproduction Approach to GVCs’, European Journal of International Law. doi: 10.1093/ejil/chac005.
- Alessandrini, D., del Pilar Cortes-Nieto, J., Eslava, L. and Yilmaz Vastardis, A. (2022) ‘The Dream of Formality: Racialisation Otherwise and International Economic Law’, Journal of International Economic Law. Oxford University Press, pp. 1-17. doi: 10.1093/jiel/jgac016.
- Alessandrini, D. (2021) ‘The Time That Binds The “Trade-Development” Nexus In International Economic Law’, Trade, Law and Development, pp. 625-655. Available at: https://tradelawdevelopment.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/6.-alessandrini.pdf.
- Alessandrini, D. (2018) ‘Of Value, Measurement and Social Reproduction’, Griffith Law Review, pp. 393-410. doi: 10.1080/10383441.2018.1548332.
- Alessandrini, D. (2016) Value Making in International Economic Law and Regulation: alternative possibilities. London: Routledge. Available at: https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138936744.
- Alessandrini, D. (2010) Developing Countries and the Multilateral Trade Regime: The Failure and Promise of the WTO’s Development Mission. Hart.