JurisTalk | Legal Activism v. Rule of Law from Colonial to Independent Africa: The Case of Human Rights History

with Meredith Terretta, Associate Professor of History and Gordon F. Henderson Chair in Human Rights, University of Ottawa

When viewed through the optic of transregional legalist activism, what historians commonly refer to as “decolonization” figures as a struggle to universalize Law in order to balance international relationships that colonialism had rendered asymmetrical. Had this legal project succeeded, post independence Africa—often viewed through today’s human rights lens as a crisis zone—may have had no need for human rights, at least not for the sort of human rights movement that emerged in the 1970s propelled by institutional NGOs based in the Anglo-Scandinavian “global North.” Yet instead of universalizing during the transition from colonialism to independence, the law constricted the political futures of independent African states, their leaders and their inhabitants, eventually normalizing single-party state rule and bilateral alliances privileging former imperial centres of power.

This event is in association with FPA Research Month.