In this episode, Reed Smith’s Niyati Ahuja sits down with Dr. Steffen Hindelang, professor of International Investment and Trade Law at Uppsala University in Sweden and executive director of the CELIS Institute. Together, they explore the growing global focus on foreign direct investment screening and why it has become a key element of policymaking in the EU and beyond. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to Disputes in Perspective, a Reed Smith podcast. This podcast series will discuss disputes-related trends, hot topics, and developments occurring in the global legal landscape, and hopefully provide you with some helpful insights and practical tips. If you have any questions about any of the episodes, please feel free to contact our speakers.  Niyati: Welcome to Reed Smith's Disputes in Perspectives podcast. I'm Niyati Ahuja, senior associate in the New York office of Reed Smith. I work in the international arbitration and global commercial disputes group. I do both commercial and investor arbitration, as well as litigation in New York courts and white-collar investigation matters as well. Today, we are very pleased to welcome Dr. Steffen Hindelang to this podcast. Steffen is a professor of international investment and trade law at Uppsala University in Sweden. He's also the executive director of the CELIS Institute, an independent, non-profit, non-partisan research enterprise dedicated to promoting better regulation of foreign investment in the context of security, public order, and competitiveness. Steffen has advised the EU, European governments, as well as companies on investment tribute regimes, international investment disputes, and international organizations on the reform of the current international investment law regime. As you can tell, he has a very, very interesting background. He has been repeatedly invited by the European Parliament's INTA committee to prepare studies on the development of the EU's common commercial policy. He frequently acts as expert advisor before international tribunals and national courts and has served as an exit arbitrator. I also understand, Steffen, that you are organizing a very interesting boot camp in India next month in August on investment arbitration. I'd love to know more about that before we delve into the more serious topics we're going to discuss today about foreign direct investment screening. So I'd love to know more about this boot camp. Would you just share a few lines about that?  Steffen: Of course. First of all, thanks very much for having me. Delighted to be here and talk about two worlds which come together. And that's also the topic of the boot camp. We are jointly organizing with a leading Indian institution. The idea here is to explore crossroads of investment arbitration and economic security regulation. We are inviting students, public servants, attorneys which want to know more about this emerging topic and of course also issue how two worlds come together and possibly collide and how we can make that coalition as painless as possible.  Niyati: Yeah that sounds wonderful and is it in in Gujarat is that correct?  Steffen: Indeed that's in Gujarat It's going to be hot in a double sense. Temperature is going to be quite intense. But also the topic, I think, if I may say so, it's going to be quite hot. And we are at the forefront here, exploring how investment screening measures and others will trigger or may trigger investment arbitrations.  Niyati: Yeah, sounds very interesting. If you do want to, if anybody wants to know more about the boot camp, please do reach out to Dr. Steffen. Okay, now getting to the basics and the more serious topics, let's begin with the basics. What is foreign direct investment screening and why do you think it has become so central to policymaking in the EU and globally as well?  Steffen: I think originally, or let's say for the last 30 or 40 years, we have seen a hyper-globalization. The world has come or had come tog