5 December 2023
Throughout 2023, CIBEL member Associate Professor Kun Fan has been presenting her research on arbitration, mediation, sustainability, and more to leading institutions around the globe. CIBEL would like to highlight some of Associate Professor Fan’s activities in knowledge exchange over the past year.
In June of 2023, she was invited as a visiting scholar to the Institute of Comparative Law, University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas in Paris, where she worked closely with Professor Marie-Elodie Ancel, Co-Director of the Master of Comparative Law and co-founder of the International Academy for Arbitration Law (Arbitration Academy).
Associate Professor Fan also participated as a panellist at the 150th Anniversary Symposium of International Law Association (ILA) in Paris on 19 June. Guided by the event’s theme of ‘Build Tomorrow’, Associate Professor Fan explored ‘Is arbitration adapted to mixed/asymmetric disputes?’ Her presentation discussed certain impediments in using arbitration to resolve such disputes and proposed reform options. Associate Professor Fan suggested that arbitration should be understood as a means not an end - that ADR be thought of as an essential element in a range of tools that is available for parties to choose from when resolving disputes. Her presentation emphasised that arbitration should be considered part of dispute management from upstream dispute prevention to pre-arbitration consultation/negotiation and investor-state mediation, even after arbitration is initiated. Her overall message to audiences and ILA urged consideration of opportunities for amicable resolution either in combination, such as med-arb, or in parallel with the arbitration proceedings, including comprehensive dispute resolution mechanism combining different dispute resolution options.
In August of 2023, Associate Professor Kun Fan was a visiting scholar to The Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (SIDRA), Singapore Management University (SMU) Yong Pung How School of Law. During this visit, she participated in the 2023 Singapore Convention Week – an annual event focusing on dispute resolution – by speaking at the UNCITRAL Academy Conference on 29 August.
Associate Professor Fan contributed to the topic ‘Tomorrow’s World Today: Leading the Future of Dispute Resolution’ by participating in the panel ‘Navigating Intercultural Needs in Mediation and Arbitration.’ She discussed the concept of culture in a dispute resolution context and gave examples of cultural assumptions that underpin the arbitration and mediation process. Associate Professor Fan also unpacked the impact of cultural models on the dispute resolution process, using Chinese culture as an example. The panel ultimately explored the importance of navigating intercultural needs in mediation and arbitration, and what it means for a dispute resolver to be culturally fluent.
Finally, Associate Professor Kun Fan was invited as a Scholar in Residence at WilmerHale’s London office, where she presented her current working paper on dispute resolution in the Belt and Road Initiative and exchanged ideas on her current research. Associate Professor Fan’s research on this topic focuses on China’s reliance on the amicable resolution of disputes in the BRI and aims to analyse the reasoning for China’s reliance on amicable methods of resolution from cultural, socio-economic and socio-political perspectives. Keep up with Associate Professor Kun Fan’s research on SSRN, LinkedIn and Twitter.
The image above was originally sourced from the Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (SIDRA) via LinkedIn.