African International Economic Law

Conference Update: The 2023 African International Economic Law Conference Website and Registration Now Live

April 13, 2023

The African International Economic Law Network (AfIELN) is pleased to announce its conference website and that the registration for its 6th AfIELN Biennial Conference is now open.

Conference Website and Registration 

The registration page can be found here .

Locating Fragmentation in the 'Africanization' of International Investment Law

Contemporary scholarship on international investment law (IIL) in Africa has emphasised the 'Africanization' of IIL. This article argues that the presence of a cross-cutting policy vision in the Africanization of IIL should not be viewed as its conceptual sine qua non but as a significant challenge to its end goals.

Call for applications for the Afronomicslaw Academic Forum (Eastern Africa)

The Eastern African Regional Board, which is the leadership of the Forum in Eastern Africa, is looking for students, early-career researchers, and early-career practitioners from the whole Eastern African region who are passionate about international economic law to join the Forum as part of its second cohort.

Book Review of Fox and Bakhoum: Making Markets Work for Africa (OUP, 2019)

Arguably, Fox and Bakhoum’s Making Markets Work for Africa does more than take part in this literature, it helps bring it into focus, crystallizing its insights and articulating a number of its internal debates.  Perhaps this assessment should be nuanced a bit.  Despite their extensive footnotes and their admirable collaborative scholarship and drive to work from and with African sources (for instance with the Quarterly Competition Review produced by CCRED), the book is focused more on the policy problem than on the existing literature about the problem.  This is not a book about books; it is a book about identifying a complex economic situation with challenges and opportunities and charting and driving a particular line in favour of a better life for Africa’s population.

The Fourth AfIELN Biennial Conference – Addressing Africa’s Voice in Global Economic Governance

With the purpose to bring together scholars and scholarship that highlights original and innovative thinking in IEL as it pertains to the African continent, the idea was to follow up with the existing tradition that consists in engaging with new scholarship and research on the continent’s contributions to, and involvement with IEL. This task proved at the same time challenging and quite rewarding. The call attracted responses of high calibres as reflected by the quality and quantity of abstracts received, as well as the global representation of the submissions.