International Economic Law

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.

A primary objective of the AfSDJN is to undertake research, advocacy, tactics and strategies around the changing nature of debt, globally and in Africa, which threatens economic development, social cohesion and several gains made in building social contracts in recent years. Afronomicslaw.org is grateful to Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, (OSISA) Economic Justice Program and Open Society Foundation’s African Regional Office.

It is time for international economic law to start paying serious attention. Law and politics have a complementary role in addressing the growing climate change crisis. Law has to pay attention to its antecedent: politics.

As a preliminary matter, based on the research that has been done so far to address the primary question as to whether there is an Asian approach to international law that is distinct from international law that was derived from the West, it is too early at this point to make a substantive conclusion that there is a unique perspective to international law that emanates from Asia.

Traditional international law (IL) teaching and research has reached an inflection point (TRILA Report, 24).  Content-wise it has long been monopolised by the usual suspects: sources of law, treaties, statehood, territory, jurisdiction and specific values such as universality and equality among states. The most conservative IL scholars will smirk at the thought of alternative ‘transnational’ or ‘Third World’ approaches to IL. To be fair to them, lawyers are fond of compartmentalising. We have those that do private law, public law, human rights, international economic law, law and development, business and human rights law, health law, dispute resolution law, to name a few. Yet as the current pandemic is showing this type of boxed thinking cannot provide the tools for meaningful teaching and research about today’s legal conundrums. We live in an uncertain world in which one issue can raise a myriad of legal problems that straddle multiple fields of law.

In this blog article, building on the findings of the TRILA Project Report, and using AfronomicsLaw blog as a case example, I focus on the role of academic blogging as one of the digital tools that has great potential in shaping scholarly development in international economic law in the Global South. The AfronomicsLaw blog, launched less than two years ago, has exponentially grown, and therefore this blog article provides scholars, legal practitioners, policy makers, law students and readers and followers of the blog in general with an opportunity to assess the benefits of academic blogging through its lens.

This blog post focuses on the Agreement for the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and the implications for the evolution of lex mercatoria in Africa. This blog post is primarily based on a recent paper by Chisa Onyejekwe and Eghosa Ekhator titled ‘AfCFTA and Lex Mercatoria: Reconceptualizing International Trade Law in Africa’. The paper argues that some of the major innovations embedded in the AfCFTA (such as variable geometry and dispute settlement amongst others) form the crux of an emerging African practice of lex mercatoria. Consequently, the creation of AfCFTA has engendered what can be termed as an emerging concept of ‘Lex Mercatoria Africana’. In the context of the AfCFTA, this is exemplified by the notion that the AfCFTA explicitly promotes African trade principles.