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Reflections On The Value Of Socio-Legal Approaches To International Economic Law In Africa, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe Jul 2021

Reflections On The Value Of Socio-Legal Approaches To International Economic Law In Africa, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In their introductory essay to the 2021 Chicago Journal of International Law Symposium, Daniel Abebe, Adam Chilton, and Tom Ginsburg offer an account of “the rise of the social science approach to international law, explain the basics of the method, and advocate for its continued adoption.”

This Essay critically assesses how and why one might use socio-legally inspired methods (analytical, empirical, and normative) for the study of international economic law (IEL) in Africa. It illustrates the empirical method’s importance in understanding one of the most challenging aspects of the study of IEL in Africa: capturing the data and dynamism of …


Dispute Settlement Under The African Continental Free Trade Area, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe Apr 2021

Dispute Settlement Under The African Continental Free Trade Area, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

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Article 20 AfCFTA establishes a Dispute Settlement Mechanism, the Protocol on Rules and Procedures on the Settlement of Disputes (‘the AfCFTA DSM Protocol’; ‘Protocol’) and a Dispute Settlement Body (‘DSB’) for resolving disputes between State Parties. The AfCFTA dispute settlement mechanism is a central element of the AfCFTA as it provides security and predictability to the regional trading system (Art 4 AfCFTA-DSM Protocol). The AfCFTA dispute settlement mechanism will ‘preserve the rights and obligations of State Parties under the Agreement and clarify the existing provisions of the Agreement in accordance with customary rules of interpretation of public international law’ (Art …


Africanization And The Reform Of International Investment Law, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe Apr 2021

Africanization And The Reform Of International Investment Law, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

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Recent trends in reforms by African states in the field of International Investment Law (IIL) has been dubbed as the Africanization of IIL. These important debates regarding reform of IIL in Africa foreground innovative aspects of International Investment Agreements (IIA) in contrast to the traditional IIL regime. The debates also remind us of the relative lack of African voices in the global IIL reform agenda. There is however little research that critically analyze the Africanization of IIL thesis.

This article undertakes this analysis. Drawing on TWAIL, it characterizes Africanization of IIL into ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ reforms. The article analyzes the …


Judicialization Of Election Disputes In Africa's International Courts, James Thuo Gathii, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe Jan 2021

Judicialization Of Election Disputes In Africa's International Courts, James Thuo Gathii, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

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This article assesses what benefit losers of high-stakes national elections think they will get from petitioning international courts in Africa. We seek to establish how judicial intervention differs before an election when there is a risk of an international law violation, versus after an election has occurred and the result is viewed as flawed. We address these questions by drawing on a set of disputes decided by international courts in Africa in the African Court, the Economic Community of West African States (“ECOWAS”) Community Court of Justice, and the East African Court of Justice. We supplement our analysis by discussing …