Babatunde Fagbayibo on Decolonising the Curriculum from the TWAIL Perspective

Описание: Professor Babatunde Fagbayibo discussed his article, ‘Some Thoughts on Centring Pan-African Epistemic in the Teaching of Public International Law in African Universities’ on 20 July 2022, joined by Professor Thamil Venthan Ananthavinayagan.

Babatunde Fagbayibo is a professor in law at the University of South Africa. He graduated with a doctoral degree in Public Law, with specialisation in regional integration law, from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His research primarily focuses on the institutional development of the African Union, in particular the process of endowing the organisation with supranational competences. Other research interests include critical approaches to international law, transnational policy analysis, and governance and democratisation in Africa. He has written widely on issues of African integration, development, and democracy and good governance in Africa. He is the editor in chief of the Southern African Public Law Journal, and also serves on the boards of the African Journal on Democracy and Governance, the Nigerian Yearbook of International Law and the Caribbean Law Review.

Thamil Venthan Ananthavinayagan holds an LLM. (Maastricht University), a PhD (NUI Galway) and has been a Teaching Associate at University of Nottingham since February 2021. Before joining the University of Nottingham, he worked as a Fellow and research assistant to the Irish Centre for Human Rights in Galway from 2013-2017 and worked as Lecturer in International Law at Griffith College Dublin from 2017-2020. His doctoral research focused on the engagement of Sri Lanka with the United Nations human rights machinery, published as a book in 2019. Thamil’s research interests lie in (post)-colonial studies, racism and fascism in international law, Critical Race Theory, and TWAIL and he has published widely in these areas.

Babatunde Fagbayibo, ‘Some Thoughts on Centring Pan-African Epistemic in the Teaching of Public International Law in African Universities’ (2019) International Community Law Review 170:

The teaching of public international law in Africa remains unresponsive to the imperative of decolonisation. The curriculum in many universities across the continent remain steeped in Eurocentric canons, and does little to disrupt hegemonic assumptions that place European thinkers at the heart of the development of international law. There is little attempt to provide a critical discussion around important epistemologies that emerged from diplomatic interactions between and among pre-colonial African Empires, and with Europeans and Asians; state building/state recognition measures; and negotiations and dispute settlement mechanisms regulating the activities of trade networks. In addition, the consideration of approaches such as the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) that have exposed the non-neutral underpinnings of international law remains marginal or non-existent. In this respect, this article proposes ‘critical integrative approach’ as a viable ontological framework that should shape the inclusion of important pan-African epistemic in the teaching of public international law in African universities.