Book Review Symposia

The role of the international community in achieving adequate access to energy and reducing energy poverty, particularly at the regional level, is the central theme of Dr Victoria R Nalule’s book under this review.

Access to energy is an important part of the everyday survival of modern humankind. However, not all energy forms are healthy for humans and the environment. Given that different countries have various degrees of endowment in energy resources and varied energy needs, cooperation is important for addressing the individual challenges of nations. An interesting contribution of the book is the in-depth review of the renewable energy potential in SSA while highlighting the basic requirements for tapping the full potential of these sources

Nalule’s book is a comprehensive critical analysis of the energy access and energy poverty issues that plague Sub-Saharan Africa (“SSA”). She conducts this discourse within the energy transition discussion and presents it through the lens of the sustainable development theory.

I am proud to present this book symposium on my book titled, Energy Poverty and Access Challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa: The role of Regionalism (Palgrave, 2019).  With the increasing role of regionalism and globalism, this book discusses the various energy challenges in Africa, and how these can be addressed through regional cooperation.

The way in which State immunity is applied can tell us something about the scale of values of the society in which we live. It is striking, for instance, to note that despite the rhetoric of human dignity in international law, the international community rejects the possibility of a “human rights exception” to immunity but accepts the commercial exception.

The book offers an updated and comprehensive view of the status of the different legal regimes that govern sovereign debt operations. While this book was not written with the outbreak in mind, it provides unique insights into the legal challenges that states and policy makers from the global south ought to consider when facing the challenges of the post Covid-19 world.  The following post offers some takeaways from the book.

The most glaring gap in global economic governance is the lack of an orderly and fair sovereign debt restructuring arrangement.  Annamaria Viterbo’s new volume, Sovereign Debt Restructuring: the Role and Limits of Public International Law, helps us understand why this is so and how we might move forward. 

Multi-sided music platforms are part of the digital creative economy consisting of the various aspects and processes through which creative works are made/produced, distributed and used. In this reflective post, I will discuss the questions posed in the book talk and panel discussion I organised titled “The Digital Creative Economy in Africa: Copyright, Law and Policy”.

Multi-Sided Music Platforms and the Law is a book that provides a well-informed, thorough and rigorous treatment of relevant legal issues from an African perspective, whilst never losing sight of the ‘broader picture’. As such, it is expected to benefit a diverse group of readers, as well as policy and law makers in Africa and abroad in tackling relevant legal conundrums effectively.

The book titled Multi-Sided Music Platforms and the Law: Copyright, Law and Policy in Africa is a timely contribution to literature in this era, with regards to the music boom in Nigeria and other parts of Africa and the existence of music platforms for entertainment as well as commercial purposes. There is a voluminous scholarship in this book on law and multi-sided platforms generally on one hand and copyright law specifically on another. The author focused on the legal and regulatory issues that arise from the use of copyright-protected content by multi-sided platforms in digital advertising.