Symposium Posts

Apart from important recent examples that will be formative, we believe it is long past time for international economic law to take stock of its hidden heritage (including settler colonialism) and how this ongoing legacy invariably intersects with IEL’s impoverished notions of economy, as well as its impoverishing approach to migration.

A welcome discussion has emerged around ameliorating labour supply and demand mismatches across the globe by expanding labour markets. South Africa and Nigeria are among several African countries with a structural unemployment problem, characterised by labour market inefficiencies, such as slow pace of job growth and low productivity. It has long been suggested that structural unemployment problems could be eased through reducing barriers to geographical labour mobility, so combined with labour shortages at industrialised countries, the idea of expanding labour markets is mature. Yet, the returns to such labour mobility are not evenly distributed; increased labour mobility could redistribute skilled workers away from African to more productive industrial countries. Formal labour migration agreements should position themselves to address such human capital redistribution accordingly maximising the returns to contractual parties. Destination countries can mitigate the impacts of redistribution of skilled workers by committing to skill formation at source and to migrant selection practices that are inclusive of mid and lower-level skill sets. Countries of origin can improve their labour market conditions, to create, and retain skilled workers, including through adjustments of professional regulatory practices.

Initiated in September 2018, the negotiations of the new Partnership Agreement between the European Union (EU) and its Member States, on the one hand, and the Organisation of African Caribbean and Pacific (OACP) States, on the other (henceforth the Post-Cotonou Agreement), ended in April 2021. This essay examines the strong focus on mobility and circular migration. It also shows that the emphasis on readmission (extensively detailed in Chapter 4 of the Post-Cotonou agreement) is tantamount to the EU’s attempt to consolidate legal mechanisms aimed at ensuring the temporariness of international migration. Such developments raise, however, a host of challenges.

Much has been written about how international law generally, and international economic law more specifically, have enabled, facilitated and contributed to the continued racial ordering, discrimination, exploitation, and treatment of people on the move as ‘surplus’ population. The current COVID-19 pandemic, if anything, has laid bare how current economic structures entrench precarity and inequality, in a world in which borders may be seamless for goods and services, yet fortress-like and unwelcoming for those fleeing persecution, climate breakdown, armed conflict or abject poverty.

International economic law (IEL) seems largely to ignore the governance of international migration. Yet most international migration is conditioned by economic conditions. Historically, the coerced migration of enslaved Africans, and other regimes of territorial relocation were instrumental to the imperial advancement and economic profiteering that served as the precursor to contemporary global economic and political interconnection. But even today, the global economy depends on international migration. The International Labor Organization estimates that “migrant workers constitute 4.7% of all workers” globally. First World economies (at least according to reported data) rely on international migration even more than those of the Third World—“[a]s a proportion of all workers, migrant workers constitute 18.5 percent of the workforce of high-income countries, but only 1.4 to 2.2 percent of the labour force of law income countries.”

This symposium is focused on reimagining IEL for migration, underscoring the place of migration within the larger IEL discourse and unpacking the complex relationship between IEL rules and norms and international migration. The six essays in this symposium gather original and analytical work from established, mid-career, and young academics and practitioners that focus on critical, trans-disciplinary, and regional perspectives on the intersections of IEL and migration. In addition to theoretical analysis, this symposium also showcases empirical findings on the relationship between IEL and migration

Electricity security is in today’s world a critical component for a well-functioning economy. Many African countries rely heavily on fossil fuels for electricity generation, while others have successfully harnessed renewable energy sources – Kenya being an example, with over 80% of its power generation being from renewable energy sources. With the global push to de-carbonise national economies, particularly the power sector, the interdependence of countries through electricity trade will become increasingly important. Countries are now only looking to develop their own clean energy capacity, but will in future, also seek to harness that of neighouring countries through cross-border power trade.

Electricity market structures come in different shapes and forms. Many have given rise to new players, particularly in power generation. Private participation brings advantages but also challenges to a sector that cannot be looked upon in isolation from the broader macroeconomic perspective. What are those advantages and challenges? How do they play out in Sub-Saharan Africa? Contingent liabilities have become a buzz word around infrastructure project development, but what exactly are they and how concerned should governments be? And most importantly, what can be done to tackle them?

Africa is by far the continent with the lowest carbon emissions, accounting for between 2% to 3% of global CO2 emissions (with South Africa accounting for about 33% of all CO2 emissions in Sub-Sahara Africa). However, with the prospects of increased intra-Africa trade as a consequence of the ambitions of African states under the African Continental Free Trade Area ("AfCFTA") it is inevitable for CO2 emissions to increase with the expanded use of fossil fuels (petroleum products, gas and coal) in prospective industries[1] who intend to tap into the opportunities that the AfCFTA presents. In addition, the prospects of increased trade between Africa states and other strategic trading partners such as the United States, the European Union and China will also contribute to Africa's pie of CO2 emission to increase gradually overtime. As for the rest of the world, the commitment to decarbonization the global economy has become even much strong pursuant to the release of report titled 'Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis' dated August 2021 by the Intergovernmental Committee on Climate Change ("ICCC Report"). The ICCC Report has set-off the alarm bells that it may already be too late to meet the CO2 emissions target and has re-emphasized the need for accelerated investment in clean energy technologies and has now largely solidified the significant role green hydrogen can play as part of the energy transition from fossil fuels (petroleum products etc) to meet the global target of reducing CO2 emissions to about 1.5 degrees Celsius.