Lawyers and the “new extraction” in Africa

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the ongoing “new extraction” on the African continent. Contrary to mainstream scholarship and policies that see in law an external variable to remedy the “resource curse,” this paper channels attention toward the role of law as an institution of extraction in the longue durée. Unpacking the close association of law with the conversion of economic surpluses and power into enduring social relationships can help trace the mechanisms by which the uneven and unequal connection between Africa and the world is being negotiated, justified and challenged over time. Design/methodology/approach To this end, this paper deploys an approach anchored in political sociology of law and focuses on the roles played specifically by lawyers to trace the “interconnectedness” between European colonialism on the continent and the consolidation of the contemporary international economic and legal political order. It illustrates this approach with the case study of the “Africa” Bar in Paris as a key site in which extractive deals between multinational corporations and Francophone African states are negotiated. Findings This micro focus helps to explain the dual position of the “Africa” Bar in Paris, as offshore yet connected as it is shaped by both imperial legacies and ongoing waves of globalization into the African continent. Originality/value This approach traces a more nuanced explanation of Africa’s unequal and uneven relationship with the global economy as one shaped by the path of imperial legacies and successive and interconnected waves of globalization across Africa.

On the Sociology of Law in Economic Relations

“…Business lawyers are proactive, both moulding existing rules and lobbying for and helping to formulate new law. This has been documented in a variety of specific fields, such as international taxation (Picciotto, 1995), insolvency and bankruptcy regimes (Halliday and Carruthers, 1993), international arbitration (Dezalay and Garth, 1996), antitrust regulation (Miola, 2016), utilities and infrastructure (de Sa e Silva and Trubek, 2018), as well as in broad political and economic transformations in Africa (Dezalay, 2019), Asia (Dezalay and Garth, 2010) and Latin America (Dezalay and Garth, 2010, Pérez-Perdomo, 2006). Since lawyers both create and interpret legal concepts and discourses, legal practices mediate between the political realm, which provides the necessary underpinning of legitimate coercion, and the real-world sphere of economic activities.…”

Book Review: Transnational Law and State Transformation. The Case of Extractive Development in Mongolia

“…First, because it brings empirical flesh to the Comaroffs’ dubbing of “(o)ld margins (…) becoming new frontiers” – but not as a place “where mobile, globally competitive capital (…) finds minimally regulated zones in which to vest its operations” (2012: 13). On the contrary: the mining boom in Mongolia came at the tail-end of the regulatory “catch-up game” that followed the societal and environmental damages of the previous mining booms in Latin American and Sub-Saharan contexts, “where the damage of the initial gaps ha(d) never fully been assessed” (Dezalay, 2019: 1306). Lander tracks a constitutional-like process whereby the “negotiation of the state with capital” (p. 207) has led to the reordering of the state's position as enabler of market expectations, and with it, to the conflation of politics with market branding, under the influence of “a distinctively global rule of law discourse, promoted by both internal policy elites and external actors” (p. 227).…”