Abstract
The odious debt doctrine, which holds that in some cases, successor governments should not be responsible for the debts incurred by previous despotic rule, has limped along in the legal imagination for over a hundred years. Recently, however, legal theorists and practitioners have attempted to define the contours of this controversial concept. This article investigates the contents of the odious debt doctrine to query what characteristics make debt odious rather than simply onerous. It then argues that there may be little distinction between those characteristics as they apply to debt and as they apply to other types of transnational financial obligations and financing arrangements that despots may adopt. Finally, the article posits that if there is, in fact, little distinction, there may be valuable lessons to be learned from the odious debt doctrine for application to other types of transnational financing arrangements, and proposes that a broader “odious finance” doctrine is the better approach.