Third World Approaches to International Law

Afronomicslaw.org invited submissions on the teaching of international economic law, (IEL), in Africa to reflect on a number of questions. We asked the contributors to reflect on these questions: What materials did you use to teach? What teaching style did you adopt? Did you center Africa or make the materials relevant to an African context in the materials you used and if so how? For example, did you use of African case studies; or use African-specific materials (e.g. books, articles, cases, treaties)? Was the class required? How many enrolled in the class? How did you determine grades in the class? Did class participation count towards the grade? Did you have prior background in the area when you first taught the course e.g. in your graduate school education, in your research and scholarship, in practice? How would you say the students received the course? Did they find it interesting, relevant, or indifferent?

The adoption of imprecise and relaxed SDT provisions that can easily provide leeway for countries to evade SDT obligations will only work contrary to the stated objective of the Agreement to promote and attain sustainable and inclusive socio-economic development among State Parties. Just as Amartya Sen correctly puts it, “the central issue of contention is not globalization itself, nor is it the use of the market as an institution, but the inequity in the overall balance of institutional arrangements—which produces very unequal sharing of the benefits of globalization”