Rate My Professor j.bonnitcha@unsw.edu.au Bonnitcha

Associate Professor Jonathan Bonnitcha serves in the School of Global & Public Law at the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law & Justice. He earned a DPhil, MPhil with Distinction, and BCL with Distinction from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, along with an LLB with First Class Honours and a BEc with First Class Honours and Medal from the University of Sydney, where he received the University Medal in Political Economy and the Convocation Medal. Before joining UNSW, Bonnitcha advised the Myanmar Government on investment governance while based in Myanmar and spent several years at the Australian Attorney-General's Department, contributing to the successful defense of a multi-billion dollar investor-state dispute over Australia's tobacco plain packaging laws under an investment treaty. He has worked part-time at UNSW from 2019 to 2021 and again in 2024.

Bonnitcha's research centers on international economic governance, with a particular emphasis on investment treaties, incorporating interdisciplinary insights from economics and political science. Key publications include his co-authored book The Political Economy of the Investment Treaty Regime (Oxford University Press, 2017, with Lauge N. Skovgaard Poulsen and Michael Waibel) and monograph Substantive Protection under Investment Treaties: A Legal and Economic Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He has authored numerous articles and book chapters on investment arbitration, treaty impacts, and dispute settlement reforms, published in leading journals. Bonnitcha has obtained Australian Research Council Discovery Grants, such as the 2025–2029 project on national security exceptions in trade and investment treaties (with Caroline Henckels and Elizabeth Sheargold) and the 2022–2025 project on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (with Heng Wang, Kun Fan, and Ross Buckley). An accomplished supervisor, he has mentored nine PhD students to completion. He is an elected steering committee member of the academic forum guiding UN investor-state dispute settlement reforms, a Senior Associate at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, and has consulted for the United Nations Development Programme and Transparency International. In 2021, The Australian's Research Magazine recognized him as Australia's top international law researcher.