International commercial arbitration is often presented as a neutral, transnational, and technocratic field of dispute resolution. Yet beneath this self-image lies a deeply stratified system of knowledge production. This talk argues that the legitimacy crisis of international arbitration cannot be understood solely through questions of demographic representation among arbitrators. Rather, it must also be approached as an epistemic problem: who produces arbitral knowledge, which jurisdictions and institutions are treated as authoritative, and how certain doctrinal assumptions become global common sense. Focusing on the sociology of the arbitral profession, the talk examines how elite academic-practitioner hybrids, concentrated institutional networks, and prestige-driven geographies sustain a centre-periphery structure in arbitral thought. While arbitration claims to be delocalised, its intellectual foundations remain anchored in a small number of metropolitan hubs, whose actors shape legal doctrine, procedural standards, and reform agendas. Peripheral jurisdictions are not simply excluded; they are incorporated as sites of reception, replication, and market expansion, often through local elites trained to reproduce the centre’s assumptions. By reframing inequality in arbitration as epistemic rather than merely demographic, the talk shows how commercial incentives, professional prestige, and post-colonial hierarchies together produce a narratively homogeneous but globally unequal arbitral order.

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