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

Poverty, Agency and Resistance in the Future of International Law: An African Perspective

This article enquires into the likely posture of future international law with respect to African peoples. It does so by focusing on three of the most important issues that have defined, and are likely to continue to define, international law’s engagement with Africans. These are: the grinding poverty in which most Africans live, the question of agency in their historical search for dignity, and the extent to which these African peoples can effectively resist externally imposed frameworks and measures that have negative effects on their social, economic and political experience. International law’s future posture in these respects is considered through an examination of concrete debates relating to agricultural subsidies, debt usury and relief therefrom, and the relocation of framework socioeconomic governance of almost every African state to external institutions. Insights about what the future holds for the effectiveness of Third World resistance are derived from a consideration of the broad lessons that can be learned from the successes or failures of some past Third World struggles