Righting , Restructuring, and Rejuvenating The Postcolonial African State: The Case For The Establishment of an AU Special Commission On National Minorities

The special theme of this volume of the Yearbook, i.e. Reflections on Some Forms of Statehood in Africa, invites contributor and reader alike to grapple with an abstract concept that has nevertheless proved to be highly consequential to the lived experience of virtually every African - at least since the mid-nineteenth century. Despite the increasingly extensive literature on the subject,l both within and without the legal academe, the topic is so complex, so controversial, so socially relevant, and so widely misunderstood still, that it does deserve further attention in a Yearbook such as this

International Solidarity, Human Rights and Life on the African Continent ‘After’ the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has left a massive amount of disease, death, fear and despair in its stride, and will continue to seriously trouble the world even in its wake. To be sure, Africa has not been spared any of these maladies. In the result, the pandemic has posed a formidable threat to the enjoyment of human rights around the world. More specifically, as is widely recognised, the pandemic (and many of the measures taken to end it) have seriously threatened or harmed the enjoyment by billions of people across the world, the continent included, of the human rights to health, life, education, food, shelter, work, freedom of movement, liberty, and freedom of assembly. Less obvious to many is the fact that the pandemic (and the dominant responses to it) can also constitute serious harm to the enjoyment of the rights to development and democracy, and to freedom from discrimination and gender-based violence. Even more troubling is the fact that these dangers and impacts tend to be exacerbated in the Global South to which Africa belongs geo-politically and identity-wise, and in relation to the poor and the racially marginalised everywhere

Critical Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL): Theory, Methodology, or Both?

This paper engages with the question of whether TWAIL is a theory, a methodology, or both. It takes the mainstream positivist understandings of the concepts of theory and methodology seriously in order to assess TWAIL scholarship against those (admittedly contingent) measures. It argues that TWAIL offers both theories of, and methodologies for, analysing international law and institutions, before concluding that TWAIL can be usefully thought of in the way suggested by its very appellation: as a broad approach

Receiving the Headian Legacy: International Lawyers, South-to-North Resource Transfers, and the Challenge of International Development

Written over fifteen years ago by Ivan Leigh Head, a highly distinguished Canadian international lawyer, foreign policy expert, and international development thinker, the words contained in the above quotation point firmly at this great man\u27s analytic incisiveness and hint at the sheer depth of his fairness of mind. For although the net transfer of resources from the much poorer geopolitical South to a far richer North remains to this day one of the most important obstacles to international development, rarely have the dominant accounts of international development given this phenomenon the pride of place that it surely deserves

The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights as a Collective Human Security Resource: Promise, Performance and Prospects

This chapter argues that contrary to the way in which it has been generally imagined in the dominant collective human security literature, the African Commission is by design, and in terms of its institutional practice, an important collective human security resource in Africa. Section 2 of this chapter provides a short background on the African Commission. Section 3 discusses the normative and textual promise that the African Commission shall, through the effective discharge of its broad human rights mandate, serve as an important collective human security resource. Section 4 then systematically considers the institutional practice of the African Commission in this regard, and reaches analytical conclusions as to the quality of its performance. Section 5 examines the African Commission\u27s prospects as a collective human security resource, and makes some recommendations as to what needs to be done to enhance its utility and significance as such a resource. Section 6 summarizes and concludes the chapter