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.

The International Law Association (ILA) Committee on Alternative Dispute Resolution in International Law is delighted to announce a conference on Shaping Appropriate ADR in International Law on 7 April 2025, in collaboration with the ILA Italian Branch and with the Department of Law of the University of Florence. The conference will focus on a series of presentations based on papers collected through this Call.

The African Society of International Law (AfSIL) is pleased to invite paper proposals for its fourteenth annual conference on the theme “Africa, Culture, and International Law.”

The News and Events category publishes the latest News and Events relating to International Economic Law relating to Africa and the Global South. Every week, Afronomicslaw.org receive the News and Events in their e-mail accounts. The News and Events published every week include conferences, major developments in the field of International Economic Law in Africa at the national, sub-regional and regional levels as well as relevant case law. News and Events with a Global South focus are also often included.

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.

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).

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.

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.