Lawyering imperial encounters
- Date: 2024-12-19 - Type : OUV
- Auteurs : 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.
Sara Dezalay's research revisits the long history of extraction between the African continent and global capitalism since the 19th-century scramble for Africa. Focusing on sites of imperial encounters—in London, Paris, Abidjan, Bujumbura, Kinshasa, Johannesburg, and 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 subordinate position in the global economy. She demonstrates the symbiosis between the legacy of imperialism and the detrimental societal and environmental impact of the current rush for Africa's “green” minerals. Her work, reviewed in the Law & Society Review, offers a powerful postcolonial critique of the double bind of law, both an instrument of facilitation and a bulwark against predation.
Her new research project analyzes how dispute resolution mechanisms (from local courts to international investment arbitration) contribute to codifying the symbolic and material value of climate change, focusing on four empirical contexts: the Democratic Republic of Congo, a key extraction site for minerals essential to the carbon transition and new technologies; Bolivia, a hotspot for ecological and political struggles over natural resources; India, where new technologies, labor, castes, and indigenous resistance meet extractive capitalism; and Singapore, an emerging center of global justice for mediating the value of financial flows. She is developing this research based on a seed networks project, entitled "Redistributing value in African mineral value chains: an agenda for research and action" funded by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.
In 2020-22, Sara Dezalay also served as adjunct judge (appointed by the UNHCR) at the French National Court of Asylum (CNDA). She subsequently co-coordinated an ethnographic investigation of asylum justice with Sharon Weill (American University of Paris), funded by the Institut des Études et de la Recherche sur le Droit et la Justice. Their public report, Asylum justice: between crisis and crisis routine. Ethnography of the National Court of Asylum, is forthcoming.
Sara Dezalay is the main supervisor of two PhD candidates: Francesco Betti (with Sabine Weiland as co-supervisor at ESPOL) "Integrating Food Sovereignty and Food Democracy: A Pathway to Sustainable and Just Food Systems" and Leonardo Pesci (with Sonia Le Gouriellec as co-supervisor at the C3RD), "Spiritualising Sovereignty: Faith, Statehood, and the Secular-Religious boundaries across Africa".
Full CV here.
Full publications here.