TWAIL

Globalisation and digitalisation of the economy has radicalised tax administration and commerce in Africa. While there is still significant room for growth, there has been a paradigm shift in Africa’s development policy landscape over the past three decades. Economic liberalisation measures aimed at opening up the continent to global market forces and attracting foreign direct investment have significantly replaced state intervention and public ownership in most African countries.1 There is a race amongst governments in the continent to optimise and harness the vast tax potential of both the digital economy and the emerging digital finance market involving trading in cryptocurrencies, Non-Fungible Tokens (“NFTs”), and other digital assets. They aim to embrace the regulatory complexities of both the digital economy and the emerging digital finance market with a view to making their countries fit for the digital age and to building a future-ready economy that works for the advancement of their people. However, the rise of globalisation and digitalisation of the economy, including the economic liberalisation that followed, has (amongst other factors) allowed tax and commercially related Illicit Financial Flows (“IFFs”) to thrive in Africa. IFFs from Africa are said to have assumed crisis proportions in recent times.3 Global Financial Integrity (2010) reportedly estimates IFFs from Africa between 1970 and 2008 alone at more than U$1 trillion, an amount that dwarfs the combined inflows of developmental assistance and foreign direct investments into the continent over the same period.4 Nigeria is also reported to have led other resource-rich African economies with this enormous outflow, put at US$217.7 billion, or 30.5% of the total IFFs from Africa within the relevant period.5 Africa is currently estimated to be losing more than US$50 billion to US$86.63 billion annually in IFFs.6

Olakpe's scholarly contribution is a thought-provoking addition to the discourse on South-South migration. Through an in-depth conceptual and methodological analysis of the law from below and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), Olakpe unveils the intricate layers of migration dynamics. Departing from the conventional south-north migration paradigm, this book unpacks the nuances of south-south migration through a critical and transformative lens, reorienting the dialogue towards the subtleties that characterize this unique migration pattern. At the heart of Olakpe's approach lies her innovative utilization of case studies and legal ethnographies in Nigeria and China. These studies serve as a lens through which she illuminates the experiences of marginalized subaltern communities, offering a critique of international law's role within the context of South-South migrations.

Opening with the impact of untold narratives, Oreva Olakpe’s book, South-South Migrations, and the Law from Below, analyses South-South migrants in international law through a TWAIL lens. It considers ‘stories of building community, finding justice outside the protections of the state, and of their struggles against discrimination and exclusion within a state that does not recognize international migrant and refugee protections.’ (2) It weaves the experiences of undocumented migrants in the spaces that they are occupying while situating the impact of their experiences in international legal work. The book intentionally centers on undocumented communities as subjects of international law to map how they interact, shape, and resist in their own spaces. Doing so, the book critiques dominant literature that treats the Global South as objects of international law. The book attests to the agencies of undocumented migrants.

International legal scholarship on migration remains obsessively focused on migration from the global north to the global south. Even knowledge production anchored in critical traditions within international law, such as Third World Approaches to International Law (“TWAIL”), tends to skew in the direction of analysis that centers Third World encounters with the First. This general orientation comes at the costly expense of a deeper understanding of what Oreva Olakpe terms “South-South migrations” in her powerful intervention addressing this glaring shortcoming in the literature. Neglect of detailed study of experiences of international law in the global south, and in South-South relations, results in more than a merely incomplete picture of the nature of international law.

International court decisions, the corruption of the elite in the Global South, and the refusal of states to uphold their obligations towards people who are excluded from the privileges of citizenship shape how migrants experience law, as well as how they forge their paths to justice, recognition, and access. This book and symposium contribute to efforts to understand and document how international law impacts migrant communities, but also how these communities fill the lacunae created by law and migrant status through their acts of contestation and innovative approaches. It delves into the evolving approaches to migration and international obligations in the two states as they face new migration-related challenges.

One of the sites where the legacies of colonialism continue to be perpetuated in the Global South is the law classroom. In the teaching and research of international law, ‘mainstream’ narratives of international law are privileged as the Subject, and critical international law scholarship is treated as the Other.

This is the video recording of the Afronomicslaw Academic Forum Guest Lecture Series on "The Sovereign Alien: History, TWAIL, and International Economic Law" by Prof. Antony Anghie with Humphrey Sipalla as discussant.

The Afronomicslaw.org Academic Forum Lecture Series brings experts and discussants together to discuss broad issues arising from international economic law as they relate to Africa and the Global South.

The Afronomicslaw.org Academic Forum invites you to join their next guest lecture series.

May 14, 2021