Analysis

The Analysis Section of Afronomicslaw.org publishes two types of content on issues of international economic law and public international law, and related subject matter, relating to Africa and the Global South. First, individual blog submissions which readers are encouraged to submit for consideration. Second, feature symposia, on discrete themes and book reviews that fall within the scope of the subject matter focus of Afronomicslaw.org. 

Book Review III: Sustainable Development, International Law, and a Turn to African Legal Cosmologies (Godwin Eli Kwadzo Dzah) (CUP, 2024)

International law applies to the interchanging relationships and rules between states, including the establishment of norms and standards which govern their activities. This changing landscape of international law is recognised in one of the introductory paragraphs of this book: ‘international law possess an inherent transformative power to renew and remake itself if we are committed to reimagining the discipline and its fundamental characteristics, including the concept of sustainable development’ (pg 2). Sustainable development (SD) has been an integral part of international law discourse before the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). Hence, this book focuses on the ahistoricism and influence of international law on the environment and sustainable development in African legal systems through a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens.

Book Review II: Reimagining sustainable development by centring African customary law: A TWAIL analysis

This book is about reimagining sustainable development. At a time when many scholars have become disillusioned with the concept and calls for abandoning sustainable development in favour of new concepts abound, Dzah makes an impassioned call for us to retain the idea, whose ancient roots predate its co-optation by Western (legal) hegemony, while think about it in a radically different way. The way in which he suggests we do this, is by turning to African relational ontologies and environmental ethics that (re)conceptualise humans “as mere co-occupants of nature with other species”.

Book Review I: Towards Worldview Interactions: A Review of Godwin Eli Kwadzo Dzah, Sustainable Development, International Law and African Legal Cosmologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Dr. Godwin Dzah’s thought-provoking book investigates the actual and potential contributions of Africa and its peoples, including through their rich worldviews, to the making and doing of international law, treating sustainable development as a microcosm. At its core is a vision to deploy Africa’s Indigenous worldviews to reimagine sustainable development, advance thinking on how it should be applied in international law going forward.

Book Review Symposium Introduction: Sustainable Development, International Law, and a Turn to African Legal Cosmologies, Godwin Dzah (CUP, 2024)

I am very happy to introduce the symposium on my book, Sustainable Development, International Law, and a Turn to African Legal Cosmologies, by Cambridge University Press in May 2024. This symposium features four very thoughtful and critical reviews. These four reflections should be read as companion pieces together with my introduction. They address different aspects of the book, provide points of convergence and divergence, and foreshadow future research. I am grateful to these reviewers for their kind engagement with my book, for their constructive criticisms and positive feedback. I am equally grateful to the editors of AfronomicsLaw.org for curating this symposium.

Migration: A Force for Resilience and Broad Positive Social Change within and beyond the ‘Global South’ amid the Climate Crisis?

In this analysis, migration and its relation with climate change and development are examined through Sen's (1999) capabilities framework for human mobility. Migration is a people-centric activity where one may want to reside in or relocate to a desired area. Discussions around the connection between climate change and migration are growing in academic and governance contexts. Scholars are increasingly recognising migration's role as a strategy for adaptation and development. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) suggests that there is no direct relation between climate changes and migration decisions. Viewing migration as merely adaptation can understate the varied causes of forced migration, which include sociology, economics, politics, and ecology. Addressing climate migration effectively requires considering political and economic processes and their interrelations.

Innovative Finance for Refugees? Self-reliance, Resilience and the Humanitarian-Development Nexus

Traditionally, the world of international cooperation has been split in a binary, where refugee responses and the creation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) were situated in the humanitarian action field, with the consequence that help provided to refugees was reduced to specific situations of short-term displacement, assuming that the initial situation would eventually resolve and refugees would be able to go back to their countries of origin. For many crises, however, this has not been the case, given their complexity and scale. These ‘protracted’ crises, despite the language of urgency, have been at the centre of the humanitarian stage for decades. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the longest protracted situation are the more than 2.4 million Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan, but the situation of Syrian, South Sudanese, Somalis, Sudanese, Congolese or Eritrean refugees also qualifies as ‘protracted’, according to the definition that the UNHCR has been employing since 2004. The evidence of this long-term persistence of crises has been the search for durable solutions, which have been traditionally three: resettlement in another country, voluntary repatriation to the countries of origin and local integration. Yet, these solutions have not been curated by refugees themselves, but rather from the interests of the so-called ‘developed’ nations or the Global North, who have established the policies of the UNHCR through its governing body, the Executive Committee (ExCom).

Is it possible to retheorize ‘dignity’ and human development through refugees?

Refugees as a particularly vulnerable group have increasingly found their way into recent discussions in philosophy, public policy, law, judicial decisions, etc. In fact, the Global Compact on Refugees aims to present a preliminary version of the importance of refugees in contemporary ideas of human agency-based development. Building on this, I propose that deeper engagement through a refugee lens must underlie two interlinked conceptions that are informing law and policy on various rights issues, i.e., ‘human dignity’ and a human capability-based development theory, the Capability Approach (CA). These conceptions are relevant since they have been reifying the way development is viewed to simultaneously address global issues and promote human agency. Yet, till now, even these two ideas are confronted by a (non)citizenship blind spot, particularly in relation to refugees. Thus, I wish to emphasise that the complementary understanding of dignity and CA needs to incorporate the category of ‘refugees’ to be fully coherent as theories of development. I particularly utilise Martha Nussbaum’s foregrounding on dignity in her theory of the CA to highlight its relevance yet the need for further work to include the legally ‘non-citizen’ refugee who does not neatly fit into the idea of nation states and the closely connected citizenship paradigm.

Migration-Development Nexus through a Gender Lens

It has been 25 years since Sen’s seminal book “Development as Freedom” was published. A lot has changed since then, also in terms of how we tend to perceive the relationship between migration and development. For one, and to paraphrase Sen, migrants have begun to be perceived as “responsible persons” who “chose to act one way rather than other”. To migrate, or to stay. This reasoning is reflected in the recent work of, among others, Hein de Haas (2021) and Kerilyn Schewel (2020), who perceive migration – or lack thereof – as a result of people’s aspirations both in terms of their right to move (de Haas) and to stay (Schewel). Importantly, as argued by the latter, a systematic neglect of the causes and consequences of immobility – i.e. of people’s staying preferences – obscures any efforts to understand why, when, and how people migrate. By developing the aspirations-capabilities frameworks to explore the determinants of (im)mobility, de Haas and Schewel have contributed a great deal to altering the status quo in migration research, which has often focused on the more easily quantifiable, economic factors underlying migration decision-making. Importantly, unlike most mainstream theories of migration, the aspirations-capabilities framework becomes even more relevant when acknowledging the highly gendered nature of migration.

Symposium Introduction: The Right to Development and Migration

The symposium brings together four contributions by four distinguished authors. The contributions articulate both the potential and pitfalls of the aspirations/capabilities model of the nexus and highlight particularities when the framing is applied together with other layers (gender, climate crisis, refugees). Two of the contributions discuss their topic using the term “migration” while others look into the issue in the context of “refugees.” Notwithstanding the importance of the distinction between “migrants” and “refugees” in current global frameworks, the purpose here is to stimulate debate that goes beyond this fluid dichotomy. In popular parlance, the term “refugees” is used to connote “migrants” or “non-citizens” in general.

Two Lawyers Came to Political Power in Africa Today – Duma Boko in Botswana and Prof Kithure Kindiki in Kenya: A Brief Reflection

Today, November 1, 2024 two lawyers came to political power in Africa. In Botswana, Duma Boko President of the Umbrella for Democratic Change which includes his Botswana National Front swept to victory putting ending the 58 year-old hold on power of the independence ruling party the Botswana Democratic Party. So sweeping was Advocate Duma Boko victory that the ruling party is trailing fourth in the polls. To his credit, President Mokgweetsi Masisi conceded defeat even before the final results were announced and promised a peaceful transfer of power. Botswana therefore joins a few African countries like Ghana where there has been a peaceful transfer of power when an incumbent party loses to an opposition party.