Taking on the State: An African Perspective

Commentary on Cooper and Emerto

Land Reform in Kenya: The History of an Idea

The great legal scholar Patrick McAuslan described the 1990s as inaugurating a new era of land law reform. Land law reform has taken place on a significant scale since 1990: a total of 32 new national land laws have been enacted since 1990 in nearly 60 per cent of African states. Land issues have been the cause of both simmering discontent and violent conflict throughout Kenya’s colonial and post-colonial history. They remain a ‘key fault line’ in modern Kenya. Historians of Kenya and commentators on its politics continue to find patrimonialism, ethnic favouritism and corruption at play, nowhere more so than in the politics of land. Kenya’s problems with land defy easy description: they remain complex and multi-faceted and include massive and worsening inequalities in access to land, a propensity to land grabbing and continuing conflicts over who is and who is not entitled to occupy land. Efforts to address these problems have since before independence been erratic at best

Judicial review and the future of UK development assistance: on the application of O v Secretary of State for International Development (2014)

In this paper we explore a case for judicial review brought against the Secretary of State for International Development by an Ethiopian national, Mr O. The claimant alleged that the Department for International Development (DfID) had failed adequately to assess evidence of human rights violations in Ethiopia to which funds provided by DfID had contributed. Warby J ruled that the claim merited a full hearing. DfID is unaccustomed to judicial review: the O case is the first time since the 1995 Pergau Dam case that UK development aid has been reviewed by the courts. We study Warby J's judgment and its implications for accountabiity for aid decisions. We argue that both the wider context for aid and the legal framework governing development assistance have changed significantly in the 20 or so years since Pergau. In particular, we show that despite the UK's new legal commitment, made in 2015, to spend 0.7% of gross national income (GNI) on official development assistance, the existing mechanisms for scrutinising aid decisions are inadequate. We argue that there is an accountability gap in relation to the UK's now considerable development spending and explore the role of judicial review in this context

Making UK aid work: why scrutiny is key – and how to achieve it

The effectiveness of UK aid spending is reliant on the government’s ability to exercise meaningful oversight over spending decisions. This oversight is currently lacking, explain Ambreena Manji and Daniel Cullen, putting the effectiveness of aid spending at risk

Roundtable review. Land, law, rumour and research.

Round table of responses to Prof Grace A. Musila's book A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward murde

Kenya’s devolved land administration marks the start of a new phase of political struggle over land control

Catherine Boone and Ambreena Manji examine whether long-awaited land law reform in Kenya has resolved longstanding land grievances

The limits of socio-legal radicalism: social and legal studies and third world scholarship

n this review to mark the 25th anniversary of Social and Legal Studies (SLS), we offer an assessment of the evolution of socio-legal scholarship on the Third World. We seek to locate the journal in the broader history of socio-legal studies and legal education in the United Kingdom and to consider its engagement with the work of Third World scholars. In order to do this, we recall the founding commitment of the journal’s first editorial board to non-western perspectives on law and locate this commitment both historically and biographically. We explore a number of important interventions concerned with socio-legal studies in the Third World, but also point to significant gaps and omissions since 1992. To end, we argue for a reassertion of SLS’s founding commitments to anti-imperial scholarship and the challenges posed by critical, non-western perspectives

The grabbed state: lawyers, politics and public land in Kenya

In 2002, Kenya's new National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) undertook to investigate and ensure the recovery of all public lands illegally allocated by the outgoing government. A Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal and Irregular Allocation of Public Land, chaired by the lawyer Paul Ndung'u, was appointed. The commission's report sets out the illegal land awards made to powerful individuals and families, provides important information about the mechanisms by which public land was misallocated, and shows how the doctrine that public land should be administered and allocated ‘in the public interest’ was consistently perverted. This paper explores what the Ndung'u report tells us about the role of the legal profession in the illegal and irregular misallocation of public land. It makes clear that the legal profession, far from upholding the rule of law, has played a central role in land corruption, using its professional skills and networks to accumulate personal wealth for itself and others. This stands in contrast to the role of the legal profession in promoting good governance and the rule of law envisaged by donors of international development aid. This paper focuses on ‘local’ land grabbing, and argues that the ‘global land grab’ or ‘investor rush’ needs to be understood alongside local manifestations of land privatisation