In practice, international investment agreements (IIAs) entail conflicts of interest between the investor and the host state over the nature of the control that could be exercised over the foreign investment. Essentially, the investor’s interest is to control its investment within a stable and predictable legal regime, while the host state seeks to exert its sovereign power to define its policies. Investor–state arbitration is deemed to be a crucial feature of foreign investment protection because it provides access to a neutral forum for the settlement of disputes. Investor–state arbitration is not only an alternative to the domestic courts of the host state, but also a technique that  ‘depoliticises’ the disputes, by removing them from the intergovernmental political relationship between the home state and the host state. The course on “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” would be more than a course on arbitration. In fact, it is designed as a specialized course which pays attention to the great specifity of Investor-State Dispute Settlement.