As the legal discipline tasked with managing cross-border relationships and legal pluralism, private international law should hold a distinctive place on the African continent—where legal systems, traditions, and normative orders coexist, overlap, and interact in complex ways.
Despite its potential, the field has only recently begun to garner sustained attention at both the continental and regional levels. The legal instruments and methodologies of private international law remain underexplored in many African contexts, even as the continent deepens its participation in global trade, investment, and migration flows.
Yet the stakes are high.
These mechanisms will be instrumental in building legal certainty, in structuring international exchanges, and in reinforcing the legitimacy and visibility of African legal systems on the world stage.
More broadly, private international law offers an opportunity to rethink legal connectivity in Africa in a way that is both inclusive of its plural traditions and attuned to the realities of globalization.
My contributions on this topic:
To be published: “A River Always Returns to Its Bed Reclaiming Ubuntu for a Genuine Africanization of Private International Law », proceedings of the conference Developments in African Private International Law with a particular focus on the work of the HCCH and OHADA held at the University of Johannesburg, 30 september – 2 october 2024
➢ “L’OHADA en quête de règles uniformes de droit international privé: état des lieux et perspectives”, Les cahiers de droit, june 2023, volume 64, number 2, pp.333-358.
lexafricasemper.com 