Joy Gordon’s twenty-one chapter edited volume is a massive contribution to the study of the character, legality, legitimacy, effectiveness, and impacts of economic sanctions in our time (Gordon, 2026). It is a major tome – certainly voluminous, seamlessly multidisciplinary, and quite encompassing. It is an excellent work of scholarship: thoroughly researched, written and edited; highly analytical; and very illuminating.

The International Law Association (Nigeria Branch) Africa Policy Dialogue will hold on the sidelines of the 82nd International Law Association Annual Conference in Vienna, Austria. The side event with the theme - Peace, Prosperity and the Future of International Law: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics in a Fragmenting World - was put together in collaboration with the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in Austria, the Federal Ministry of Justice of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and Aluko & Oyebode (ALN).

The book Economic Sanctions from Havana to Baghdad: Legitimacy, Accountability, and Humanitarian Consequences raises concerns of social justice, an important ethical issue about the legitimacy of sanctions, and concerns about the humanitarian crises that economic sanctions are bound to cause. Filipenko et al. define economic sanctions as mechanisms that involve restrictive economic measures applied by a country or group of countries to another country or group of countries to coerce the governments of those countries to change their policies. These measures are not only taken by countries against countries but also by international bodies against individuals and entities within countries. These sanctions at the international level are often used to exert political and economic leverage and secure a specific form of capitulation or change from the sanctioned country, entity, or individual.

This volume, Economic Sanctions from Havana to Baghdad: Legitimacy, Accountability, and Humanitarian Consequences, published in 2026 by Cambridge University Press, seeks to incorporate many of the perspectives that have been underrepresented in the academic discourse. This includes the work of scholars from sanctioned countries, such as Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Cuba, and Syria. It also includes the perspectives of practitioners, such as attorneys and humanitarian aid workers. In addition, this volume addresses issues that are complex, but of great significance. For example, while sanctions often include humanitarian exemptions for food, the reality is that the regulatory regimes are so burdensome and unclear that private actors—banks, shipping companies, aid organizations, donors, insurers, and on and on—are driven away from engaging in even legal, humanitarian transactions.

The African Society of International Law (AfSIL) invites registration for its 15th annual conference on the “Africa and the Challenge of Reparation in International Law.” The conference will interrogate foundational concepts and practical modalities of reparation in international law, assess convergences and divergences across regimes and institutions, and examine Africa’s proposals, contributions and claims. AfSIL welcomes proposals that offer theoretical innovation, empirical analysis, comparative insight, or practice-based evaluation, with clear implications for counsel, adjudicators, negotiators and policymakers.

In Corporate Governance in Africa, Victor Ediagbonya embarks on a critical examination of the corporate governance landscape within the African banking sector, offering a well-reasoned and empirically grounded challenge to the wholesale transplantation of the Anglo-Saxon model into sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing from institutional and stakeholder theories, Ediagbonya proposes a ‘Functional Stakeholder Model’ (FSM) as a context-sensitive alternative governance framework. This book stands as a significant contribution to both comparative corporate governance and the broader discourse on institutional reform in developing economies.

Corporate Governance in Africa, authored by Victor Ediagbonya, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Brighton, addresses a pressing but underexplored problem in African banking. The book examines the failure of corporate governance frameworks to protect the interests of stakeholders such as employees and customers when banks collapse. It argues that Nigeria and South Africa have adopted the Anglo-Saxon corporate governance model from the United Kingdom, a model designed around shareholder primacy and premised on the existence of strong legal institutions and active financial markets.

Victor Ediagbonya’s Corporate Governance in Africa advances a compelling, context-sensitive critique of the transplantation of the Anglo-Saxon, shareholder-centric corporate governance model into African banking systems, particularly Nigeria and South Africa, and proposes a tailored alternative: the Functional Stakeholder Model (‘FSM’). The book’s thesis is straightforward yet significant: corporate governance “best practice” from developed economies performs unevenly when exported to jurisdictions with different institutional realities; banking sectors in countries marked by institutional voids, weak legal enforcement, insider dominated ownership, underdeveloped capital markets, and systemic corruption, require frameworks that are explicitly designed to recognise and protect a broader set of stakeholders beyond shareholders.

The Anglo-Saxon corporate governance model practised by most African countries traditionally seeks to protect only the shareholders as the residual owners of an enterprise. (Ngwu, Osuji and Stephen, 2017). The engagement and protection of the interests of various other stakeholders have become an important corporate governance discourse in academia as well as in practice. Given the complexity of the African business environment, the importance of effective stakeholder management cannot be overemphasised and has been a topical issue in recent times. Dr Victor Ediagbonya’s book “Corporate Governance in Africa” presents a transformative exposition of stakeholder management issues in Africa’s banking sector with key references to Nigeria and South Africa.

Victor Ediagbonya’s Corporate Governance in Africa offers a thoughtful and carefully structured engagement with one of the most persistent challenges in African corporate governance: the continued prevalence of governance failures despite the widespread adoption of sophisticated legal and regulatory frameworks. Rather than attributing these failures solely to doctrinal gaps, the book invites a deeper examination of the institutional environments within which corporate governance operates, particularly in the banking sector.