Congratulations to Aleksei Petrenko on a successful PhD thesis defense at the University of Göttingen!

On 20 March 2023, Aleksei Petrenko, Associate Professor of the School of International Law, successfully defended his doctoral thesis at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. The title of his dissertation is «The Right to Regulate in International Economic Law: Towards a General Theory with Lessons from the GATS». During the defense, Aleksei demonstrated a deep level of knowledge and research skills in his field. He presented original scientific results that received high praise from the doctoral committee.

Aleksei Petrenko’s doctoral dissertation examined the regulatory space under international investment and trade agreements. These agreements are often perceived as being imbalanced, and as a result, states are seeking to regain control over their policies by entering into new agreements, revising old ones, and adding to them new types of provisions, some of which explicitly recognize the right to regulate. One of the first such examples was the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), whose negotiating history made it possible to trace the origin of this concept in the WTO context. Through his research, Aleksei determined approaches to the regulatory space in the respective areas of international economic law and concluded about the feasibility of a shared understanding of the right to regulate, including its possible content.

 Congratulations to Aleksei Petrenko and his academic supervisor — Prof. Dr. Peter-Tobias Stoll from the University of Göttingen on this significant achievement in scientific career!