Sara Dezalay

Sara Dezalay is Professor of International Law and International Relations at ESPOL and Pedagogical Head of the Master's International and Security Politics. She holds a PhD in Law from the European University Institute and a Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) in Political Science from the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris I.

Her research examines the long-term entanglements between law, extraction, and global capitalism, with a particular focus on Africa and the Global South. Revisiting the history of imperial encounters since the nineteenth century, her work analyzes how legal institutions, dispute resolution mechanisms, and legal professionals contribute to shaping unequal relations between states, markets, and societies in the global economy.

Her latest monograph, Lawyering Imperial Encounters: Negotiating Africa’s Relationship with the World Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2024), draws on multi-sited research conducted in London, Paris, Abidjan, Bujumbura, Kinshasa, Johannesburg, and The Hague. It shows how legal intermediaries have historically negotiated, justified, and normalized Africa’s subordinate position in global capitalism, and how the legacies of imperialism continue to structure contemporary forms of extractivism. The book offers a postcolonial critique of law as a double-edged instrument - simultaneously facilitating economic predation and providing resources for contestation - and has been reviewed in Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, South African Historical Journal, World Trade review and through a dedicated roundtable in the Socio-Legal Review.

Her current research agenda is grounded in a critical diagnosis: law and legal institutions tend to intervene too late, or in ill-suited ways, in the regulation of global value chains and socio-environmental harm. Against this backdrop, her work seeks to rethink the place of law upstream of conflict and litigation, by situating legal norms and actors within the political economy of value chains and by deliberately disrupting disciplinary and sectoral silos. This agenda is currently developed through a seed networks project funded by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) and the Fondation de la Catho de Lille, entitled “Redistributing Value in African Mineral Value Chains: A Research and Action Agenda.”

Building on this project, Sara Dezalay is developing the foundations of a Climate and Energy Justice Clinic at the Catholic University of Lille. Conceived as an interdisciplinary and experiential learning platform, the clinic aims to bring together law, social sciences, and other fields of expertise, while actively involving students, researchers, and practitioners in upstream and downstream interventions related to extraction, climate justice, and social inequalities. The project is articulated through a series of international workshops designed to institutionalize long-term research, teaching, and action-oriented collaborations across academic and professional communities.

Alongside her academic work, Sara Dezalay served as an adjunct judge at the French National Court of Asylum (Cour nationale du droit d’asile), appointed by the UNHCR, between 2020 and 2022. She subsequently co-coordinated, with Sharon Weill (American University of Paris), an ethnographic research project on asylum justice funded by the Institut Robert Badinter. The resulting public report, Asylum Justice: Between Crisis and Crisis Routine, is forthcoming.

She currently supervises two PhD candidates: Francesco Betti (co-supervised with Sabine Weiland, ESPOL), whose research explores food sovereignty and food democracy as pathways to sustainable and just food systems; and Leonardo Pesci (co-supervised with Sonia Le Gouriellec at the C3RD, Catholic University of Lille), whose work examines the relationships between faith, sovereignty, and statehood across Africa.

Full CV here.

Full publications here.