This book engages with contemporary African human rights struggles including land, property, gender equality and legal identity. Through ethnographic field studies it situates claims-making by groups and individuals that have been subject to injustices and abuses, often due to different forms of displacement, in specific geographical, historical and political contexts. Exploring local communities’ complexities and divided interests it addresses the ambiguities and tensions surrounding the processes whereby human rights have been incorporated into legislation, social and economic programs, legal advocacy, land reform, and humanitarian assistance. It shows how existing relations of inequality, domination and control are affected by the opportunities offered by emerging law and governance structures as a plurality of non-state actors enter what previously was considered the sole regulatory domain of the nation state.

This collection challenges the prevailing conflict of laws approach to the interaction of state and indigenous legal systems. It introduces adaptive legal pluralism as an alternative framework that emphasises dialogue and engagement between these legal systems. By exploring a dialogic approach to legal pluralism, the authors shed light on how it can effectively address the challenges stemming from the colonial imposition of industrial legal systems on Africa’s agrarian political economies.

An integrative rights-based approach to human development in Africaby Dejo Olowu2009ISBN: 978-0-9814124-6-7Pages: x 322Print version: AvailableElectronic version: Free PDF available.

African legal realities reflect an intertwining of transnational, regional, and local normative frameworks, institutions, and practices that challenge the idea of the sovereign territorial state. This book analyses the novel constellations of governance actors and conditions under which they interact and compete. The work follows a spatial approach as the emphasis on normative spaces opens avenues to better understand power relations, processes of institutionalization, and the production of legitimacy and normativities themselves. Selected case studies from thirteen African countries deliver new empirical data and grounded insights from, and into, particular normative spaces. The individual chapters explore the interrelationships between various normative orders, diverse actors, and their influences. The encounters between different normative understandings and actors open up space and multiple forums for negotiating values. The authors analyse how different doctrines, institutions, and practices are constructed, contested, negotiated, and adapted in translation processes and thereby continuously reshape Africa’s multidimensional normative spaces. The volume delivers nuanced views of jurisprudence in Africa and presents an excellent resource for scholars and students of anthropology, legal geography, legal studies, sociology, political sciences, international relations, African studies, and anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of how legal constellations are shaped by unreflected assumptions about the state and the rule of law.

"African civil law countries are traditionally described as monist and common law countries as dualist. This book illustrates that the monism-dualism dichotomy is too simplistic, in particular in the field of human rights. Academics and practitioners from across the continent illustrate how domestic courts in Africa have engaged with international human rights law to interpret or fill gaps in national bills of rights. The authors also consider the challenges encountered in increasing the use of international human rights law by African domestic courts."--Back cover.

Reprint of the 1995 edition with 1999 addendum.