African International Economic 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.

The African International Economic Law Network (AfIELN) invites the submission of abstracts for its 6th Biennial Conference taking place at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Accra, Ghana, from 21 to 24 June 2023.

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.

This colloquium will examine Africa’s response to the pandemic, in particular, those relating to international economic law. This colloquium fills the gap left by the absence of our biennial conference in 2021 and will instead hold virtually in July 2021.

We write to thank our readers and contributors for a really productive 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.

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.