Introduction
Welcome to the Rethinking Legal Research in and with Africa blog symposium where the africanlegalstudies.blog and the Law and Development Conversations Blog join forces! This symposium emerged from the early career workshop Rethinking Legal Research in and with Africa: Legal Methods, Critical Perspectives, and Decolonial Approaches in the Context of Human Rights and Sustainable Development, which took place from 16–18 March 2026 at the University of Antwerp as a collaborative event organised by the Law and Development Research Group at the University of Antwerp together with the Chair of African Legal Studies at the University of Bayreuth.
The initial idea for this workshop was to bring early-career researchers from Antwerp and Bayreuth together, having identified overlapping interests between the two research institutions. As planning progressed, more colleagues joined the conversation, ultimately bringing together a diverse and inspiring audience of around 35 bright and kind minds.
The endeavour to critically rethink legal research in and with Africa – something that is not new at all – is clearly an exercise that takes more than three days. The workshop was therefore largely designed as a forum for joint exchange and learning, with a key element being a co-creative session in which the participants worked on joint blog contributions.
The contributions to this symposium, to be published on Tuesdays and Fridays over the coming weeks, were prepared by participants – mostly in pairs – of the workshop as part of these co-creative sessions held on the last day of the workshop. By then, participants already knew their colleagues’ research interests, enabling them to choose one or more partners for writing. We invited participants to reflect on the topics discussed during the workshop. The goal was to capture and preserve some of the thought waves that emerged throughout these days of reflection, and to seed longer-term collaborations between individuals and institutions. In this sense, the topics range from international criminal law and human dignity to business and human rights, and include a call for African perspectives on law and anthropology as a field. In the symposium they are structured into two main parts: The first part of the symposium brings together contributions that engage with questions of methods and methodology in the context of African legal research, and the second part presents case studies that explore specific legal issues and contexts, demonstrating how these methodological discussions play out in practice across diverse research topics and geographical settings.
The workshop’s rationale enabling the symposium
In the original attempt to bring early career researchers from Antwerp and Bayreuth together, the idea was grounded in the observation that international human rights law together with its research (key angle for both institutions), despite persistent and well-articulated legitimacy critiques from scholars and practitioners in the Global South, remains shaped by Global North paradigms and often overlooks local lived realities and plural legal orders. On this basis, scholars such as Mutua have argued that there is a continued pressing need for greater methodological, epistemological and ethical awareness in legal research, to ensure that the perspectives and practices of communities in relation to particular legal systems are acknowledged and meaningfully integrated.[1]
In this regard, we invited the participants to critically reflect on socio-legal research on human rights and sustainable development in diverse African contexts. Central questions also concerned research audiences, methods, historical contexts, and researcher positionality. These topics also extend to the organisation of the workshop and symposium itself, including the individuals, institutions and geographical locations involved. There is critical awareness of this, which was further sharpened through the organisation of the workshop.
Contextualising law, questioning neutrality?
Before we turn to the contributions that follow, we would like to share some thoughts on methodologies (broadly understood) in the context of legal research in and with Africa. In one workshop session, participants had the chance to present the research methods they are using or have used before and received feedback from their peers. A common thread that ran through most presentations and associated discussions was the continued struggle with the law’s objectivity as well as with expectations of “standard” methodology. For this reason, we want to dive into this as the co-creative blog symposium’s first theme, which is also reflected to different extents in the contributions that follow.
To start with, we argue that both the use of ‘standard’ doctrinal legal methods and the attempt to erase the researcher’s positionality reinforce the alleged objectivity of law. Proponents of the black-letter law tradition seek to uphold the objectivity of legal analysis. It is perhaps this logic that Ngũgĩ had in mind when she sarcastically warned scholars not to “bring the disease of political activism in [their] scholarship”. [2]
Firstly, part of the claimed objectivity in law concerns scholars’ positionality: the attempt to factor out one’s individual and subjective realities that evolve from and differ through experiences, emotions, religious, social and geographical backgrounds as well as identity in research and writing might seem at first glance to be an honourable or necessary deed in order to meet the academic “normative standard”. However, the scholar always maintains a relationship to their research subject, their argument and the audience. In the field of nursing, Kim Mitchell expresses, in relation to the female academic voice,[3] to be understood within the discourse of knowledge: “[…] writing without inclusion of the person who created the work leaves an incomplete message, and this political and personal struggle makes [one’s] writing voice a source of methodological concern. The process of research and the writing of research becomes just as important as the actual finding.”[4] The objectification of research and academic writing attempts to erase these connections for a better (or worse?) good. Thus, following the “normative standard” allegedly comes with incentives of professionalism and academic credibility, but with what (academic) voice do we speak with then? Or are we voiceless?
Secondly, the choice of methods is more than simply a question of which tool to use to answer a certain research question. It shapes who counts as knowledgeable, who has a voice, and how law and social realities are interpreted. In this regard, the deployment of and aspiration for objectivity in methodology often function as devices that, in legal contexts and beyond, contribute to the exclusion of, among others, African scholars and African knowledge-making. In doing so, they reinforce existing hierarchies and power structures in academic spaces by privileging particular (white? male?) academics. Critiquing these assumptions reveals that criticality lies precisely in questioning the existence of a single normative methodological standard. It is reflected in the refusal of an allegedly neutral application of the law, in challenging the exclusion of situated and lived experiences from legal scholarship, and in the refusal of the exclusion of one’s individual reality in the writing.
In essence, the claim of objectivity allows and reinforces legal scholars to factor out social, political and economic realities through their choice of methods as well as one’s own positionality, thereby presenting their work to be more scientific and consequently more favourable. However, the failure towards the neutrality of law has in its different dimensions been extensively and eloquently demonstrated by scholars of critical legal theory.[5]
Neutrality & objectivity masking power
That the setting of a “normative standard” which ignores and erases social, political, economic and individual realities has a bourgeois, classed, white, Western and masculine background is hardly surprising.[6] Law is embedded within the broader formation of “heteropatriarchal capitalist colonial modernity”,[7] where legal norms help translate dominant assumptions about property, labour, race, gender and civilisation into durable structures of extractive growth and inequality in and on the African continent and beyond.[8]
After all, we have seen the practice of treating law as objective, neutral and according to Williams, simple in almost every dimension of life.[9] As is customary, this practice also has a purpose: Objectivity in research and writing is a device used deliberately to create a “normative standard” that reinforces inherent power structures (as briefly outlined above) and thus serves as a gate keeper determining who holds access to the production of knowledge and scholarly authority. The effects are the following: One, the accepted notions of academic voices limit researchers and writers, especially those without a bourgeois, classed, white, Western and masculine background. Two, the repertory of themes and methodologies applied devalues and excludes, inter alia, African knowledge-making and African knowledge systems. By and large, objectivity as a device serves to maintain the deadlocked power relations which deny, among others, African excellence.
Conclusion
Turned around, we argue with and in this symposium that it is possible to be critical in legal research and writing, by refusing objectivity and the “normative standard”, including in the choice and application of methodology. With moving beyond the silencing effect of objectivity, it becomes possible to find, reclaim and articulate one’s own voice. This voice challenges and transcends current/previous (white? male?) structures and boundaries due to their credo. A prerequisite is compliance with the need for decoloniality, which is closely intertwined with criticality in the context of African legal research. Hence, Rethinking Legal Research in and with Africa, as will be explored in the coming days and weeks. We’re looking forward to your comments and thoughts that you can leave in the respective comment section.
[1]Overall analysis, Makau Mutua, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (University of Pennsylvania Press 2002).
[2] Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ, ‘White Privilege in African Studies: When You Are Done, Please Call Us’ (Brittle Paper, 2021) https://brittlepaper.com/2021/01/white-privilege-in-african-studies-when-you-are-done-please-call-us/ accessed 27 January 2022.
[3] Voice in the context relates to the discourse of knowledge, read Suzanne Fleischmann, ‘Gender, the Personal, and the Voice of Scholarship: A Viewpoint’ (1998) 23 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 975.
[4] Kim M Mitchell, ‘Academic Voice: On Feminism, Presence, and Objectivity in Writing’ (2017) 24 Nursing Inquiry 3.
[5] For example, James Boyle, ‘The Politics of Reason: Critical Legal Theory and Local Social Thought’ (1985) 133 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 685; Patricia J Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard University Press 1991) 8; Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas (eds), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (The New Press 1995).
[6] Ibid, 4.
[7] Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Duke University Press 2018) https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822371816 accessed 30 June 2026.
[8] Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Walter Chambati (eds), Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization (CODESRIA 2013) https://muse.jhu.edu/book/25053/ accessed 30 June 2026; Birgit M Kaiser and others, ‘Power and Polycrisis: On the Durability of Capitalism-Patriarchy-Colonialism (CPC)’ (2025) 18 Journal of Political Power 147 https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2025.2453234.
[9] Patricia J Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard University Press 1991) 10.
