Lawyering imperial encounters
- Date:2024-12-19 - Type :OUV
- Authors:Sara Dezalay
Sara Dezalay is Professor (enseignante-chercheuse HDR) at ESPOL. With a background in law and political science, she holds a PhD in Laws from the European University Institute, and an Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) from the Université Paris I.
Prior to joining the School, she was a Reader at the Cardiff School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University.
She is also an Associate researcher at the Institut des Mondes Africains (IMAF); member of the editorial committee of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales ; Associate editor of Law & Social Inquiry ; and member of the International Affairs Committee, Law and Society Association. In 2020-2022, she was an adjunct judge, appointed by the UNHCR, at the Cour nationale du droit d’asile (French national court for asylum seekers).
Sara Dezalay’s research revisits the long history of extraction between the African continent and global capitalism since the nineteenth-century Scramble. Focused on sites of imperial encounters – in London, Paris, Abidjan, Bujumbura, Kinshasa, Johannesburg or the Hague, her latest monograph, Lawyering Imperial Encounters. Negotiating Africa's Relationship with the World Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2024) shows how legal intermediaries negotiate and justify Africa’s subaltern position in the global economy. It demonstrates the symbiosis between the legacy of imperialism and the detrimental societal and environmental impact of the ongoing rush for Africa’s ‘green’ minerals. It offers a powerful postcolonial critique of law’s double-bind - as both enabler and bulwark against predation.
In 2022-2025 Sara Dezalay was also the co-PI, with Sharon Weill (American University of Paris), of a 30,000 Euro grant by the Mission droit et justice (French Justice Ministry) to conduct a multi-disciplinary and comparative study of asylum justice in France and Greece. Their report, La justice d'asile: entre crise et routine de crise. Ethnographie de la Cour nationale du droit d'asile, is forthcoming.