International Economic Law

February 15, 2020

 

This post-lecture reflection captures critical discussions from the 6th guest lecture of the Academic Forum delivered by Professor Mohsen al Attar, Dean of the University of West Indies Law School. The theme of the guest lecture was 'Decolonisation of International Economic Law'. Focusing on five tenets - capitalism, epistemology/knowledge, colonialism, international law and political economy – which Professor Mohsen used as a frame to foreground his analysis, this piece, explores the prospects and challenges of decolonising International Economic Law. In keeping with the Academic Forum's focus, it is argued that uncritical/Eurocentric approaches to teaching IEL in African universities hamper efforts to decolonise our epistemologies. In exploring alternate ways to re-frame, the global economic order, this piece also highlights the idea of 'social justice' as a valuable metric of development, i.e. socio-economic equity that raises the standard of living to the greatest extent relative to each of our circumstances.

To grasp an idea of the impacts of the RCEP for international economic law governance, this blog post looks at why the RCEP has been pursued, how it contrasts with the CPTPP, how it reshapes existing and future trade relations and lastly if and how it relates to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

The Seventh Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) will take place as a virtual conference in collaboration with Bocconi University, Milan / Italy, on 8-10 July 2021.

We are delighted to welcome Munia El Harti Alonso as a Contributing Editor. Munia brings a unique expertise in international arbitration and Investor State Dispute Settlement.

WTO members should revisit the liberalization commitments with a view to engaging in further impact assessments of present and proposed liberalization commitments. More importantly, international and national trade policy makers should welcome new imaginaries of a global digital economy, including the use of trade policy tools to make domestic digital economies competitive at the global stage. This requires a re-conceptualization of the foundations of international trade law, and national tax, competition, property, privacy and data protection laws.

This paper engages in a critical legal analysis of Professor Ian Taylor’s article, Sixty Years Later: Africa’s Stalled Decolonization. It is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis but will provide a limited legal perspective of the article’s foundational arguments on the underlying causes of Africa’s economic underdevelopment, through a legal lens rooted in intellectual property (IP) law and international investment law (IIL).

In this symposium, our contributors react to Prof Taylor’s paper by interrogating embedded structures of knowledge generation and creation, economic development in Latin America, international law, disadvantageous investment agreements, and continental integration. In particular, the essays explore how these arrangements reshape traditional centre-periphery relations.

Afronomicslaw.org, the leading blog on international economic law focused on Africa and the Global South, is looking to hire an Editorial Assistant to provide support to Editors on a regular basis in connection with the blog, the African Sovereign Debt Justice Network Project, (AfSDJN); and other associated projects of the organization.