
Ambreena ManjiCardiff University | CU · Cardiff Law School
Ambreena Manji
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (44)
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the setting up of university law schools in many African nations led to often bitter battles over the purpose of legal education. The stakes in these struggles were high. Deliberately neglected under colonial rule, legal education was an important focus for the leaders of new states, including Kwame Nkrumah, first...
Much of the promise of the good governance agenda in African countries since the 1990s rested on reforms aimed at 'getting the institutions right', sometimes by creating regulatory agencies that would be above the fray of partisan politics. Such 'institutional fix' strategies are often frustrated because the new institutions themselves are embedded...
In this paper we explore a case for judicial review brought against the Secretary of State for International Development by an Ethiopian national, Mr O. The claimant alleged that the Department for International Development (DfID) had failed adequately to assess evidence of human rights violations in Ethiopia to which funds provided by DfID had con...
In this review to mark the 25th anniversary of Social and Legal Studies (SLS), we offer an assessment of the evolution of socio-legal scholarship on the Third World. We seek to locate the journal in the broader history of socio-legal studies and legal education in the United Kingdom and to consider its engagement with the work of Third World schola...
Picking up the question of what FLaK might be, this editorial considers the relationship between openness and closure in feminist legal studies. How do we draw on feminist struggles for openness in common resources, from security to knowledge, as we inhabit a compromised space in commercial publishing? We think about this first in relation to the c...
This article tells the story of the urban Karura forest in Nairobi in order to explore access to and control of green spaces in an African city at a time of rapid, haphazard urbanization. Using insights from critical legal geography, it shows that although in strictly legal terms Karura forest remains properly gazetted public land, it continues to...
With the enactment of the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015, the United Kingdom has enshrined an aid target in law. It is now under a legal duty to spend 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) each year on aid. This article assesses the implications of enshrining a spending target for development assistance in...
The Counterpoints series presents a critical account of defining ideas, in and about Africa. The scope is broad, from international development policy to popular perceptions of the continent. Counterpoints address " Big Picture " questions, without the constraints of prevailing opinion and orthodoxy. The arguments are forward-looking but not specul...
The Counterpoints series presents a critical account of defining ideas, in and about Africa. The scope is broad, from international development policy to popular perceptions of the continent. Counterpoints address " Big Picture " questions, without the constraints of prevailing opinion and orthodoxy. The arguments are forward-looking but not specul...
This paper analyzes the Kenya Supreme Court's ruling in Odinga v IEBC, a petition challenging the declared outcome of the 2013 presidential election. The case was immediately significant given the hope that recourse to the courts would help to avoid widespread civil unrest which had followed the disputed presidential election of 2007. It was also a...
In Kenya road building, widely viewed as an ‘unqualified human good’, is closely linked to an ‘Africa Rising’ narrative. In this paper the author argues that road building is an attempt to assert political authority derived from a longstanding developmentalist impulse, one in which private accumulation and spectacular public works go hand in hand....
This article provides a critique of the final stages of Kenya’s land law reform process, which has resulted in the approval of the 2012 Land Act, Land Registration Act, and National Land Commission Act. It argues that in spite of the constitutional and political importance of the new legislation, the process was marked by haste, lack of engagement...
Corruption in Kenya has been a matter of intense concern for foreign donors and the international financial institutions. External efforts to change the ‘governance culture’ in this regard are not simply instrumental, composed of material restrictions and incentives. They are also inherently rhetorical, seeking to establish the plausibility of a se...
In 2002, Kenya's new National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) undertook to investigate and ensure the recovery of all public lands illegally allocated by the outgoing government. A Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal and Irregular Allocation of Public Land, chaired by the lawyer Paul Ndung'u, was appointed. The commission's report sets out the illegal...
The UK White Paper on International Development published in 2009 explicitly links access to financial services with poverty reduction. In doing so, it echoes the policies the World Bank set out in its 2008 Policy Research Report on Finance. This paper offers a detailed analysis of these development policies and connects the current plans for the e...
Power relations lie at the heart of this impressive and wide-ranging collection of essays. The authors (most of whom are involved with rural social movements) and the editors (who are from the Land Research Action Network) bring their analyses to bear on the agency of peasant organizations and rural workers and on ongoing practices of resistance. A...
This article examines the extent to which contemporary land reform debates are based on assumptions about ‘legal centralism’ – an implicit insistence that the label ‘law’ should be confined to state law, and that other normative orderings are, and should be, subordinate to the state. The current orthodoxy is, in other words, premised upon a model o...
This article is concerned with the portrayal of law in colonial conflict in the work of Senegalese author Sembene Ousmune, focussing in particular on the novel Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu. There Ousmane dramutises an actual strike of railway workers in 1947 in order to mount a prophetic critique of post-independence Senegal. In convening u tribunal t...
Patrick McAuslan, Bringing the Law Back In: essays in land, law and development (Aldershot: Ashgate. 2003)
The title of the book sums up my overall stance: there is an important role for law in development generally and in land reform in particular and it is, in my view, wholly beneficial that after almost three decades of virtually ignoring the ro...
Lord Denning played an important role in the establishment and development of legal education and lawyers' training in Africa from the late 1950s onwards. By exploring this involvement it is possible to add to existing work on Denning's vision of the role of law and legal professionalism. In post-colonial Africa, order and stability were best assur...
In recent months, the World Bank has issued a series of draft policy reports on land relations. This is the first time in
over two decades that the Bank has sought to review its policy on lending in the land sector. Access to the draft reports
and participation in the consultation process has, however, been severely limited. Nonetheless, the World...
This paper presents a gender analysis of the World Bank's recent Policy Research Report. It assesses the implications for women, and more widely for gender relations, of the World Bank's approach to land relations. The analysis focuses on two issues: the Report's promotion of formal rural credit and its assumption of the availability of women's agr...
This article examines the role of British legal scholars and institutions in the development of African law in the period from the end of the Second World War to the 1960s. In particular, it considers the extent to which the new legal scholars broke with the methods and priorities of anthropologists who had studied and developed African law in the...
Whilst the study of law and literature is now well established in the western academy, little attention has been paid to portrayals of law in African literature. In addition, studies of the colonial state by lawyers, political scientists, and historians have neglected African fiction's long engagement in this area. Achebe's fiction prefigured many...
The importance of effective implementation of new land laws and the difficulties associated with it are alluded to in almost every recent piece of writing on African land reform. However, the process of implementation has remained neglected and little theorised. Drawing on a body of political science and policy studies literature which considers im...
This article introduces three models by which it is possible to interpret women's relations to property: the structuralist model, the interactionist model and the entitlement model. By reference to fleldwork carried out in the Kagera region of Tanzania, it discusses the potential of each model to deepen our understanding of women's relations to lan...
This article argues that most feminist legal theory has been located within a dominant and phallocentric legal centralist paradigm and that this has hindered feminism's engagement with legal pluralism. I will argue that theoretical work which privileges state law can at best furnish us with only partial accounts of women's experiences of law. Artic...
In 1998, over seven years after a Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters was appointed by the then president of Tanzania, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, in January 1991, it is expected that a Land Bill will be tabled in the Tanzanian National Assembly. These seven years have witnessed mounting debate on the purpose and direction of land tenure reform. The pur...
The aim of this paper is to propose a research agenda for future studies of local forms of caregiving. It does this by exploring practices of care giving and receipt through the prism of childcare. Focusing on Nairobi, it investigates one critical form of care work in the city: the labour of women who work as 'nannies' in private homes, a form of l...
come to be debated both internationally and in the Tanzanian context. Two decades ago, it is arguable that the issue was barely admissible in the discourse over public policy. The dominant conception of women and land was one which subsumed the interests of women under that of men, and assumed a congruence of interest between members of the family...
In his recent speech to the Labour Party Conference in Britain, Bill Clinton said: 'I have just come here from Africa which provided me with all kinds of fresh evidence of the importance of politics. In Ghana, a new president is working with a great Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, to bring the assets of poor people into the legal system so th...