Oumar Ba’s research while affiliated with Cornell University and other places

In adopting the Malabo Protocol and creating the African Court of Justice and Human Rights, the African Union has established the first ever regional court with international criminal jurisdiction. This milestone signals once again, the role of African institutions in creating and developing norms in international politics. Yet, both International Relations (IR) theories and debates and official narratives of the historiography of the international legal order tend to omit the sustained contributions of African states and institutions. Echoes of the African Union (AU)’s efforts to define and codify crimes that are of concern to its constituents can be found in the African states’ interventions at the International Law Commission during the 1980s and the negotiations that lead to the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the 1990s. This article argues that beyond the critique and skepticism about the Malabo Protocol and the AU’s agenda, there is a sustained vision and trajectory that underlies African agency in norms creation and attempts to usher in an international legal order that speaks more directly and equitably to the concerns of the continent. Ultimately, I propose a genealogy of those Pan-African visions for an embedded international justice system that provides a fundamental corrective to the Nuremberg to The Hague narrative.

It is often pointed out that African states were early and eager supporters of the international criminal justice regime. Yet the current international legal order is starkly different from the one African states had envisioned. By revisiting the archives of two pivotal moments in the establishment of the current international legal order—the work of the International Legal Commission (ILC) in drafting the Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind and negotiations that led to the draft statute of the ICC—we find that Africa had proposed a different version of the international legal order. I contend that the visions African states held were reflective of their experience of colonial subjugation. Therefore, the Draft Code and establishment of the ICC were meant to provide an avenue for redress, amid a deep mistrust between Africa and “international law.” This article offers a revisionist historiography of the international criminal justice regime, which “writes Africa in,” and presents Africans as challengers and advocates of norms and a legal architecture borne out their experience of global marginality and the shadow of colonial domination.

Writing before the pandemic, Naeem Inayatullah argues, “Teaching is impossible. Learning is unlikely.” This chapter builds upon this polemic—the impossibility of teaching (during the pandemic)—to explore that which we owe our students. Drawing from the experience of teaching international relations at an all-male historically Black college, I propose a pedagogy of care that strives to ensure that all students will have the support needed to successfully complete the course. This shift in the middle of the 2020 spring semester was warranted, given the unique mission of the college where I work and the student population we serve. In such an adaptive pedagogy, the chapter highlights also the duty to care, the attempts to make the classroom a lively space in times of mass death, and a pedagogy built upon relationality to make sense of the pandemic, using critical IR theories and concepts.

Theories of global justice have primarily eschewed race as foundational in the contemporary structures of global inequality, poverty, and violence. A lack of will to theorize global white supremacy contributed to the obfuscation of race as a persistent organizing idea of the global order. Yet, there is a long history of critical scholarship in political theory and international relations that responds to such silences. This article argues that global justice is inherently a racialized discourse, and the architecture of international law and justice is entrenched in and perpetuates racialized hierarchies of humanity. Beyond the theoretical debates too, current critical scholarship engages the architecture of the international justice system and its attendant liberal cosmopolitanism, which rests primarily on legal institutions, that operate in a racialized superstructure.