RESEARCH
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My scholarly agenda seeks to unearth, and trouble hierarchies in these areas of law and to remedy the inequities engendered by them. My scholarship imagines more emancipatory futures.
- MATIANGAI
SIRLEAF
My research can be broadly categorized as critical international legal scholarship. Specifically, much of my writing falls in line with the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) tradition.
TWAIL scholarship reconsiders the history and development of international law and highlights the colonial legacy inherent in it. TWAIL scholarship is marked by a sincere concern for the peoples of the Third World and the decolonization of North-South relationships embedded in international law.
The “Third World” or the “Global South” refers to a group of states, which are politically, economically and culturally diverse, but are simultaneously united in their common history of colonialism and continued subordination. Even after the fall of colonialism, the "Third World" remains a political reality due to the continuing effects of imperialism and neo-colonialism. In the literature, the geographical signifier of the “First World” or the “Global North” refers to the group of states which continue to dominate global politics, law and economics. TWAIL scholarship is marked by a sincere concern for the peoples of the "Third World" and the decolonization of North-South relationships embedded in international law. My research is also deeply informed by critical race theory.
Critical
International
Legal
Scholarship
CURRENT and FUTURE RESEARCH
Global Health Law Consortium
and International Commission of Jurists (2023):
Special Issue of the International Journal of Transitional Justice (2024):
Co-authoring a book with Ruqaiijah Yearby on Racism, Law, & Health Inequality (forthcoming).
I am part of this diverse group of expert jurists, scholars, and practitioners of public health and human rights and we published the Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies.
I am Co-Editor of this special issue with E. Tendayi Achiume on Race and Racism and Transitional Justice.
Authoring a book There Are Black People in the Past: Reclaiming Our Time in Human Rights (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).
Global Health
My interest in global health was informed by me seeing the ravaging impact of HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Cholera and other infectious diseases. I started writing in this space to undermine simplistic accounts where epidemics like Ebola just happen spontaneously, like manna from the sky, or at most due to local backwardness. My research in global health has focused on analyzing the disproportionate distribution of highly infectious diseases and the role of international law in facilitating this result.
I draw attention to the differential risks for infection in the Global South, and among those already infected, for adverse consequences including death, injury, and illness. I analyze the ways in which international actors can facilitate conditions for structural violence by examining the international public health, international financial, and peace and security regimes. I discuss the relationship between infectious diseases and conflicts and talk about the need for more robust attention. I examine the limits of the law governing international responsibility and conclude that shared international responsibility norms should be developed.
I have been fortunate to provide useful guidance to state and other actors contemplating global health law reform, especially the African group of states who are hoping to shift extant conceptualizations of responsibility in novel ways. My scholarly contributions in this project help to shape advocacy for a more egalitarian mechanism of international responsibility in global health.
I also examine how race and the racial populations impacted by a given disease influence assessments of when it is in the interest of institutions, laws, individual, and society to act.
Racial valuation as a concept refers to how differing values are assigned to an individual or group based on their racial designation and the position within the social hierarchy that this status implies. One of my projects develops a theoretical framework for racial valuation and examines how the historical and scientific construction of race influenced the emergence of racial valuation norms.
International Criminal Law and Transitional Justice
My interest in international criminal law and transitional justice were informed by experiences during the civil war and the desire to see accountability and justice realized.
These fields seek to reckon with legacies of widespread or systematic human rights abuse and I approached them with initial enthusiasm and optimism about their transformative power.
Much more experimentation needs to be done to formulate effective and contextually appropriate responses to mass violence instead of the current “one-size-fits-all” approach. It is imperative that African and other actors in the Global South to play a substantial role in global rulemaking in part due to the limitations of both domestic and international institutions.
My research in this space finds that much more context-specific and locally informed approaches are needed to provide redress to survivors of human rights violations.
I became disillusioned with the fields of international criminal law and transitional justice in my work in these spaces in part because of the reflexive and uncritical way many of the projects carry out international law’s civilizing mission, and problematically rely on stereotypes regarding the inherent violence and inferiority of those othered as people of color.
The narrow target of these interventions may result in “catching individual small fry and letting the big fish loose,” like institutions, corporations, regional and geopolitical powers.
In addition, international law constructs and signifies violence in narrow ways that further structural inequality. Many accountability mechanisms are aimed primarily at securing negative peace—the absence of violence and the cessation of hostilities.
Yet the concept of positive peace encompasses not simply the removal of physical violence, but also the removal of structural violence, which enables consideration of the importance of both observable as well as latent violence. There is a need to alleviate not only the injustices caused by the conflict, but also the injustices that caused the conflict. And, in societies that have not experienced a recent history of conflict, the insecurity and instability that may result from structural violence merit close attention from a social justice perspective.
Racial Justice and Human Rights
In light of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, the Black Lives Matter movement and the effort by a number of disciplines to decolonize and combat institutional racism within the academy, international law as a field seemingly remains committed to keeping questions of race at the periphery. Much effort has been expended by Black scholars and others to subvert the continued Whitewashing of international law in the academy.
I have joined these efforts and have several projects that explicitly engage with the role of race and racism in the world today. I am currently working on a book project entitled, There Are Black People in the Past: Reclaiming Our Time in Human Rights.
From just a cursory examination of the history of people of African descent, it should be evident that Black peoples have long articulated rights claims to be regarded as human beings and to be treated with equality, dignity, and respect. The early rights claims of Black peoples were and are material to focus on because some had been relegated to the status of property, and denigrated as subhuman, while others were subjected to a multitude of states of unfreedoms and colonial domination.
If human rights are fundamentally about human dignity, then Black peoples' struggles to widen the sphere of whose dignity, liberty, and equality should be regarded and included in the moral community, and who counts as a human being is imperative to understanding the project of human rights. Yet, the multiple foundations of human rights erase the lived experiences of those that were considered less than human and subjected to various forms of domination and background their rights claims.
Human rights are rights that one has because one is a human being. Louis Henkin clarified that human rights are equal rights that “are inalienable and imprescriptible: they cannot be transferred, forfeited, or waived; they cannot be lost by having been usurped, or by one’s failure to assert them.” They are universal. One of the most persistent critiques of human rights, is that it falls within the historical lineage of the European imperial project. This book project builds on these insights by clarifying that the human rights canon does not simply embed hierarchy, it also crucially is one of erasure.
This book asks what the dominant narratives as well as more recent accounts of human rights historiography tell us about erasure, race, and hierarchy in the human rights canon. Central inquires of mine in this book are: what does it express about the project of human rights that documents and revolutions that upheld slavery and did not protect people who were enslaved, nor their descendants are regarded as foundational in human rights and those that centered formerly enslaved people and outlawed slavery do not rank in mainstream accounts of human rights genealogy? This book argues that by examining early rights claims not only manifested in law, but normative claims asserted by Black peoples through ideas, discourses, social movements, as well as rebellions we can learn a lot.
Ella Baker informs us that “oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and to move to transform it.” This project relies on legal consciousness as a framework for thinking about rights claims. This theoretical framework refers to what people do as well as say about law. Legal consciousness is a theoretical concept that was developed to address issues of legal hegemony, particularly how the law sustains its institutional power despite a persistent gap between the law on the books and the law in action.
What has not been adequately covered in the literature is how even before the development of a formal human rights regime in the 1940s, Black peoples exercised agency by making and articulating rights claims in places like Ethiopia, Haiti, and Liberia as sovereign nations. This book reclaims the time of people of African descent as agents in the human rights canon. The book reflects on the history of Ethiopia and its status as a sovereign that has never been colonized. It focuses in particular on what this represents in the political imaginary for Black liberation and self-determination.
This book also examines where the Haitian revolution, the successful revolt of the formerly enslaved, and its independence and constitution of 1805, which explicitly forbids slavery feature in human rights historiography. Haiti’s early recognition of certain civil and political rights and at least one socio-economic right is not canvassed sufficiently in human rights scholarship. Similarly forgotten in the human rights canon, is Liberia - the nation founded by formerly enslaved people and its Bill of Rights in the 1847 constitution, which explicitly forbids slavery. The Bill of Rights in the Liberian 1847 Constitution is much more expansive than the limited rights recognized in the Haitian Constitution of 1805. Yet, its provisions are also largely untold in the human rights canon. Notwithstanding the contradictions of these emancipatory efforts, their erasure from the human rights canon is unwarranted.
Moreover, because human rights are often declared and claimed before being adopted into positive law, it is imperative to not simply prioritize positive law but to look beyond it at the normative claims made by social movements and civil society groups. When one examines the human rights canon, conspicuously missing from conventional accounts is the 1920 Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World put forward by the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) which evidenced concern with liberty, justice, equality, dignity, and non-discrimination well before the legal regime of human rights was created in the late 1940s. The Declaration overtly reaches beyond and above the state throughout its fifty-four provisions. This forceful piercing of the veil of sovereignty and subordinating states’ positive laws to rights claims is not reflected in many documents that are claimed as foundational in the human rights canon.
Relatedly, there were also analogously powerful rights claims being asserted from the African continent. In 1923, delegates of the South African Native National Congress similarly met to adopt a resolution on a bill of rights in Bloemfontein, South Africa from May 28-29, 1923. The provisions clearly echo and reflect the influences of the 1920 Declaration. The 1923 Declaration also provides an example of Black peoples attempt to hold powerful actors accountable by deploying rights claims universally in ways that were not contemplated. The early rights claims advanced by these social movements and civil society groups shine a light spectacularly on how the law operates in practice, how it is selectively applied, and was not meant to extend to racially stigmatized others. This attempt to transform rights rhetoric into reality is witnessed repeatedly in the human rights story of Black peoples.
For example, the subsequent 1943 African Bill of Rights (The African Claims) demanded that all South Africans be granted the same rights and freedoms as those enshrined in the Atlantic Charter. The legacy of these declarations and their early recognition of the interconnection between civil and political rights and economic and social rights certainly influenced South Africa’s 1996’s constitution and its eventual incorporation of both civil and political as well as economic and social rights. Lastly, this book considers the period between 1900 and 1945 and the six Pan-African Congresses that were convened to discuss the status and conditions of Black peoples globally and strategize about how to abolish global anti-Black discrimination. It studies the erasure of these resolutions and considers their potential role in the formation of the human rights regime.
This book concludes that the silencing of early Black human rights claims further hierarchy, and racial subordination in human rights. Their continued marginalization has real and deleterious effects. For one, the conventional history of human rights re-inscribes the functioning of imperial power, as if Black peoples did not make efforts to assert claims as human beings to control their civil, political, social, cultural, and economic futures globally. Further, arguing that Black peoples did not make and strategically use rights claims in their emancipatory struggles as organizing tools only makes sense in a world where those claims have been rendered invisible. This project complicates narratives about the un-representativeness of the human rights regime. By looking back, as this book proposes, we can also understand the rights claims being made by Black peoples today to be regarded as fully human.