International Economic Order

There is the potential to create regional or sub-regional frameworks, which through agreements can handle claims against companies within their territories. This may strengthen local regional capacity, alleviate the allegations of complicity of the state and exemplify the cooperative spirit embodied in more recent collaborative African action. It would demonstrate an attempt at African solutions which are not dependent on home states. Nevertheless, it may not be enough to counter the lack of legally binding responsibility grounded in international law, as it would not be able to bring parent companies, who reside outside the African jurisdiction, within its scope.

This webinar was a collaboration between Afronomicslaw and the South Centre, Geneva, to mark the 25th anniversary of the South Centre. Both the South Centre and Afronomicslaw share a commitment to discuss the protection and promotion of the development interests of countries of the Global South.

The laws of the international trading regimes are crafted, not by Africans, but by economists and policymakers in the Global North, with the interest of the elites of the Global North at the heart of any prescriptions. That is why neoliberalism and the “free market” is sold as the panacea for Africa’s developmental impasse.

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).

This webinar is a collaboration between Afronomicslaw and the South Centre, Geneva, to mark the 25th anniversary of the South Centre. Both the South Centre and Afronomicslaw share a commitment to discuss the protection and promotion of the development interests of countries of the Global South.

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.

We are excited about our forthcoming symposium which centres the voices of amazing scholars from the Global South on the Investor-State Dispute Settlement Reform.

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”