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The African Challenge and Its Aftermath: Colonial Legacies and the (Re)making of the International Legal Order

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The Palgrave Handbook of International Political Theory

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Abstract

Africa occupies a paradoxical position in International Relations scholarship. Political turmoil and violent conflicts on the continent have fueled the discipline’s revam** since the 1990s. Yet: Africa remains construed as disconnected from modern History. Law and legal institutions in particular still conjure the image of a legal vacuum. Against this representation, this chapter questions the entanglement between knowledge and imperialism in International Relations scholarship. Combining Global History with political sociology of law and lawyers, it opens a research agenda to trace the interconnectedness between legal developments across Africa and the Global North. It suggests that lawyers—their social characteristics, professional strategies and political mobilizations—are an entry-point to highlight transformations of the state and the historicity of globalization on the continent in the longue durée. This underscores that it is in these so-called African peripheries that major legal, political and economic revolutions, past and present, are at play.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European School of Political and Social Sciences (ESPOL), Université Catholique de Lille, Lille, France

    Sara Dezalay

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  1. Sara Dezalay
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Correspondence to Sara Dezalay .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Howard Williams

  2. School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    David Boucher

  3. School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Peter Sutch

  4. Department of Philosophy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

    David Reidy

  5. School of Psychology and Humanities, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK

    Alexandros Koutsoukis

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Dezalay, S. (2023). The African Challenge and Its Aftermath: Colonial Legacies and the (Re)making of the International Legal Order. In: Williams, H., Boucher, D., Sutch, P., Reidy, D., Koutsoukis, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of International Political Theory. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36111-1_14

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