Introduction
The rise of the super-rich in Africa is a phenomenon that attracts growing attention and concern, as the top 5 percent of Africans now control nearly $4 trillion in wealth, more than double the combined assets of the rest of the continent’s population (Oxfam 2025). While the liberalization of trade globally has propelled increased inequality within national societies, these effects of neoliberal globalization are especially pronounced in parts of Africa where a 21st-century mineral extraction boom has resulted in a billionaire boom amidst a crisis for the many. Typically interpreted as a failure of governance, manifested most notably in inadequate state capacity to tax the super-rich, the solutions proposed by the African Union and international development finance actors alike currently focus on “countering the corrosive impact of illicit financial flows” by building administrative capacity to address tax evasion and by introducing new laws to tax wealth (ibid., 2). In Lawyering Imperial Encounters, Sara Dezalay insists that such reformist approaches miss the big picture. It is not a question of capacity building to help Africans use law more wisely to confront inequality, she argues; rather, law is an integral part of the structure that sustains the current system, and indeed leaders of Africa’s powerful corporate legal circles—whose members include both Africans and non-Africans—understand this only too well.
Lawyering Imperial Encounters deploys the theoretical toolkit of Bourdieuian field analysis to examine the role of law and of the legal profession in mediating Africa’s encounter with the globalized economy. Central to the book’s analysis is a juxtaposition of the contemporary law-political-economy nexus with what came immediately before, that is, the more “sedimented” formations of the Cold War period. In this analysis, so long as foreign investors opted for direct contact with members of government and public administration in sub-Saharan Africa’s newly independent states, the “market for private legal services” remained organized around “small chambers of one to five lawyers specializing in routine legal work on land matters” (88). Beginning in the 1980s, however, and accelerating in the early 2000s, an expanded international corporate legal market set in place a new dynamic dominated by Wall Street model multinational corporate law firms. And it is the lawyers who work within this reconfigured transnational legal field who, according to Dezalay, act as key intermediaries in the contemporary scramble for Africa’s mineral wealth. Ambitiously, Lawyering Imperial Encounters addresses the whole of the continent of Africa, so that a Bourdieuian-inspired understanding of the legal field is deployed not only to elucidate unequal center-periphery relations but also to account for relations of hierarchy within the microcosm of individual African states. The text is organized into an introduction, eight chapters, and a conclusion.
Legal Wizardry and the Financialization of Mineral Extraction
Lawyering Imperial Encounters begins by situating the reader at a particular site of contemporary sub-Saharan African resource extraction, one that has recently received widespread attention: the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for use in Apple cell phones, electric car batteries, and other staples of the so-called “green economy.” Cobalt extraction has been widely covered in the media as perpetuating unsafe labor conditions and endemic forced labor, especially in areas where artisanal mining operates largely without regulatory protections. Suggestions for “reform”—most notably from the World Bank—have focused on more or better regulation of these so-called Global Value Chains (GVCs), presenting such initiatives as addressing problems caused by regulatory “gaps.”
Yet, as Dezalay rightly points out, the reformist mantra of more or better regulation fails to appreciate the degree to which the current system of GVC governance is itself constructed and sustained by law. Indeed, the current scramble for Africa’s mineral resources has been accompanied by a “legal boom” (5). This centrality of law and legal actors in the political economy of African mineral extraction is brought home for the reader by the account offered in the book’s Introduction of the twists and turns of litigation surrounding Gécamines, a public-private DRC cobalt mining partnership that was the target in the 2010s for investor debt-recovery efforts in multiple international legal fora. As Dezalay underscores, African corporate lawyers operating as counsel to the DRC Government fluidly positioned themselves as both jurisconsult and law merchant. In the author’s analysis, it is precisely their professional positioning within Wall Street model multinational corporate law firms that has enabled these lawyers to adopt their contemporary role of mediating between capital and the state.
At the same time, Dezalay insists that the intermediaries who produce and deploy law within GVCs are not just mercenaries of neo-colonial interests, as they have been presented in some simplistic journalistic portrayals. In the book’s analysis, even as corporate lawyers operate fluidly at the service of both national diplomacy and transnational corporations, they are also distinctly legal actors, developing juridical arguments and thereby safeguarding the relative autonomy of law. Indeed, Dezalay’s account of the multi-fora Gécamines litigation demonstrates that highly technical juridical arguments did important conceptual work in presenting the para-state corporation at some points as an actor benefiting from de jure sovereign immunity and at other points as a corporate entity distinct from the state. The legal wizardry entailed in this shape-shifting of corporate actors nicely illustrates Dezalay’s point that those entangled in the extraction of Africa’s mineral wealth are “using law not wisely, but too well” (4). Clearly, there is a lot of investment-centered law and lawyering that international proponents of good governance reforms in Africa have tended to overlook.
Contextualizing the Contemporary Boom in Investor Disputes
Lawyering Imperial Encounters seeks to critically engage with a broad range of contemporary scholarly writings on GVCs and contemporary finance capitalism. However, in my reading, the book’s central problématique concerns the rise of the Wall Street-model corporate law firm, and particularly its expansion into African territories that, according to Dezalay, were previously considered France’s pré carré (“private reserve”) on the continent. In this respect, Lawyering Imperial Encounters is indebted to the work of sociologists Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, whose studies of the international legal field—including in Latin America and in East Asia—translate and extend upon Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of law’s symbolic capital and its role in mediating the reproduction of social structures (Dezalay and Garth Reference Dezalay and Garth1996; Dezalay and Garth Reference Dezalay and Garth2002; Dezalay and Garth Reference Dezalay and Garth2010). Working along broadly similar lines, Lawyering Imperial Encounters emphasizes the competitive strategies pursued by differently positioned (often francophone versus Anglo-American) legal professionals operating in Africa and/or in the domain of African resource extraction.
Lawyering Imperial Encounters applies this analysis to consider not only the professional strategies of individual lawyers but also the structural role of law in establishing global center-periphery relations. Extending and further developing the framework for national and supra-national legal field analysis set forth by Dezalay/Garth, the book incorporates recent scholarship on the often-hidden role of the US dollar and the Common Law system in backstopping neoliberal globalization (Pistor Reference Pistor2019), reading these insights concerning the “code” of capital through a Bourdieuian lens. This theoretical toolkit is helpful in allowing Lawyering Imperial Encounters to touch upon China’s role in Africa’s encounter with the world economy, which would arguably be greater were it not for the continued dominance—at least, for the moment—of dollar-backed transactions and Common Law investor dispute settlement mechanisms. Further, by drawing in recent historical scholarship elucidating the hidden hierarchies assembled by British legal dominance outside as well as inside its empire (Benton and Ford Reference Benton and Ford2016), Dezalay provides a sound motivation for her decision to devote substantial space in the book to unearthing the deep historical roots of this “code” of capital, which she sees as central to Africa’s encounter with the world economy.
A System Established on Tracks Laid Out by Colonial Law
Indeed, a core theme in Lawyering Imperial Encounters is Dezalay’s insistence that the influence of law and lawyers has been underestimated not only in today’s era of neoliberal globalization but also in the previous period of foreign interventions on the African continent. To this end, in Chapter 2, Lawyering Imperial Encounters examines the historiography of British, French, and Belgian colonial legal developments in sub-Saharan Africa to unearth how law’s contemporary mediations of state sovereignty and capitalist extraction in the African context have been established on tracks laid out during the colonial period. From disputes over chiefly rights brought to the Privy Council to French and Belgian colonial administrative efforts to resolve conflicts among European merchants, the reader learns that the law’s mediating role was far from absent in colonial Africa.
Along similar lines, Dezalay argues that the “political predation” (100) that characterizes sub-Saharan Africa today is a direct legacy of earlier waves of efforts at legal “reform.” This is fleshed out most concretely in Chapter 5, which offers an analysis of the domestic legal field in Burundi, an East African country still living with the violent legacy of colonial interventions and whose contemporary encounter with the world economy has exposed its population to exploitative mineral extraction as well as a unique concentration of development projects to foster “transparency” and “good governance.” Having spent time in Burundi between 2011 and 2014, Dezalay was able to conduct face-to-face interviews with legal professionals (as well as with diplomats, consultants, and agents of local and international NGOs). These interviews supply the basis for an analysis that traces their professional networks and that also explores how lawyers navigate between clientelism and externalism, each of which she sees as supplying a distinct source of prestige/influence (that is, “symbolic capital”). Dezalay notes that Burundi has become “a repeat player” in disputes brought before the World Bank’s investment arbitration jurisdiction (150). However, the analytical emphasis in most of the chapter is less on the details of juridical argumentation and more on the career trajectories of individual legal professionals. Deploying a Bourdieuian field analysis of class structuration, their profiles are analyzed to demonstrate how proximity to differing forms of symbolic capital (ex. ethnicity versus imperial-legacy educational structures) leads these lawyers to adopt differing types of professional strategies (ex. the jurisconsult/law-merchant versus the lawyer-as-political-dissident). While Burundi’s relationship today with global markets is clearly central to the dynamics that reproduce class hierarchies and their associated strategies, Dezalay also insists that these relations can be usefully contextualized as following from political tracks originating in the colonial past. In doing so, the book shows how Bourdieu’s theory can be applied to elucidate the (post-colonial) national legal field.
Importantly, it is not only African lawyers but also French lawyers who operate on the tracks laid out by the imperial past. This is the focus of Chapter 7 of Lawyering Imperial Encounters, which investigates the French “corporate law pioneers” whose work has enabled US multinational corporate firms to enter—and make money in—the domain of francophone Africa. The analysis draws on interviews with attorneys practicing in these multinational corporate firms, and we learn that many lawyers “got their introduction to the continent” by working on sovereign debt restructuring during the 1980s (187). As Dezalay shows, large firm involvement has continued to grow in the present era of extractive contract negotiations, yet the analysis also makes clear that many of these individuals carry longstanding family connections to colonial administration. As Dezalay writes, “the expansion of a corporate bar in Paris, fostered by the European Single Market, benefited from the continuation of the economic, political, legal and social links between the metropole and its former colonies, favoured by the system of the Françafrique” (200). One might say that the contemporary corporate African Bar in Paris represents an intermingling of Wall Street firms with both Anglophone and Francophone imperial legacies.
Resisting Empire?
The counterparts to these corporate lawyers, both African and non-African, are spotlighted in Chapter 6, where the analysis shifts to Côte d’Ivoire and discusses litigation undertaken on behalf of African victims of corporate misconduct. While it was local companies’ agents who illegally dumped toxic oil residue near the capital city of Abidjan, groups and organizations advocating for the victims developed arguments that Trafigura Group – the world’s second-largest oil and metals trader – should be held accountable as it had contracted with the local company and yet had turned a blind eye when the waste was dumped without receiving any treatment. When cases before Ivorian domestic criminal tribunals failed to hold the multinational accountable, human rights NGOs sought to obtain “offshored” justice for the victims by bringing cases before European domestic and regional jurisdictions. In Dezalay’s account, these legal efforts serve to demonstrate the multiple possible disputing venues available to victims’ advocates in the contemporary era of global supply chains and financially leveraged resource trading. Yet while some courts were willing to hear offshore justice claims, ultimately the Trafigura litigation efforts were mostly unsuccessful in holding the powerful and politically connected corporation accountable. Interestingly, Dezalay points out that the failure of the Ivorian state to impose corporate accountability was attributed to “corruption,” while the repeated accountability failures of transnational justice are seldom labeled as such, even as the underlying imbrication of economic power and governance is arguably a common structural feature.
Encountering “Africa”
As described above, Lawyering Imperial Encounters’ empirical focus is “predominantly on local sites and bundles of relations” (15) located in francophone sub-Saharan Africa. When the analysis “zooms in” to provide detailed analysis of the national legal field and/or to follow the dynamics of legal cases involving para-state entities, the particular African states are a former French colony of West Africa (Côte d’Ivoire) and two former Belgian colonies of the Great Lakes region (Burundi and the Congo), which after independence came under French influence. In addition, the book’s final substantive chapter presents an analysis of two cases heard by Paris-based dispute resolution bodies, one a domestic tribunal and the other an international arbitration institution, but where the state of origin (Guinea) is likewise a former French colony. The specter of Françafrique—which in the post-WWII era came to include an important European dimension (Hansen and Jonsson Reference Hansen and Jonsson2014)—and, even more so, of France’s declining political, economic, and cultural influence is clearly at the center of the book’s concerns.
Other countries across Africa are discussed in a more tangential manner. British colonies in West Africa (present-day Ghana and Nigeria) are treated in some detail in Chapter 2, and post-independence Ghana appears in Chapter 3 alongside South Africa and Kenya in a discussion of the “lure of nationalism” during the Cold War period. But there is much more discussion of “the City” (that is, a colloquialism that gestures at the City of London’s power as a global financial hub) than there is of any of these large and diverse African states, each of which is the subject of a rich historiography that no single book could exhaustively cover. Moreover, bringing discussion of former British colonies in sub-Saharan Africa into the analysis, while carrying theoretical appeal, at times adversely impacts the book’s readability. The complex dynamics of law’s mediating role in the capitalist political economy raise important questions that could and should be treated in greater depth by future scholarship delving into the particularities of context in Africa’s large and diverse terrain.
This, in turn, raises the question of what it means for law to “negotiate Africa’s relationship with the world economy,” to use the phrasing in the title. Does “Africa” here signify the continent’s mineral wealth, of which the rock with gold ore traces pictured on the cover of Lawyering Imperial Encounters is emblematic? Or does “Africa” instead signify the fifty-five states of the African Union? Or does it refer to the approximately 1.5 billion people who live in these African states today and who are disproportionately young (UN 2024)? They are visually represented on the cover by the bare hand of a young African miner who holds up the rock with gold ore traces, even as—as Dezalay convincingly demonstrates—the corporate lawyers servicing those who capitalize on the exploitation of this mineral wealth (and of the people whose unprotected hands mine it) remain largely out of public view.
