Sara Dezalay’s Lawyering Imperial Encounters: Negotiating Africa’s Relationship with the World Economy is a study of mineral extraction in Africa. What sets it apart from similar studies is its attention to the mechanics of that economy. Accounts of resource extraction in Africa usually go too big (abstract meditations on how capital moves with no sense of the people involved) or too small (heart-rending but blinkered studies of the miners whose labor makes it all possible). Dezalay describes the people in the middle who make this whole system turn. Specifically, she writes about a powerful set of actors who tend to hide in the background: lawyers. In this economic system, national boundaries mean very little, and the use of tax havens makes it hard to tell where the profits end up. All that is solid melts into air, and the only flesh-and-blood people who can be identified are the attorneys filing the motions.
Resource extraction from countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Burundi cannot happen without law, she shows, and she uses these places as “petri dishes” to observe how lawyers, mining companies, and governments feed off each other. The kind of corporate muckraking that Dezalay does isn’t easy. Decisions usually happen behind closed doors, and disputes are settled in arbitration hearings that are carefully kept secret. Occasionally, though, something happens in public. Dezalay jumps on these moments of visibility when she finds them. She uses them to make an argument about law’s dual nature: law is what drives this ugly extractive system, but it is also one of few things that can constrain it. Law is like a mobius strip, she argues, “at once an enabler of the consolidation of the status quo of Africa’s subaltern position in the world economy, and law’s empowering potential to disrupt entrenched relations of domination” (15). This is a variation on a theme known well to scholars of law and society; law can both be the source of harm and the thing that brings harm to light.
The early chapters of the book apply this insight across different historical periods: the first decades of colonialism, the Cold War side of the independence era, and the contemporary period of “onshoring” – a resource grab that is draining Africa’s natural resources in more or less the same way today as was done the past. The later chapters turn to specific examples of how this happens: a rare earths boom in Burundi, a scandal involving toxic oil dumping in Cote d’Ivoire, and an excellent study of professional intrigue at the Paris Bar. Finally, a chapter on the careers of international judges, inspired in part by the author’s own experiences as an adjunct judge in France, rounds out the book.
Dezalay excels at describing the arcane details of international litigation in the mining sector. We aren’t talking about any old minerals. The commodities that this book traces are things like cobalt and rare earths that are essential components in the digital products that have changed how we interact (and might be on the cusp of changing what we are). Dezalay does not make much of this fact, but it gives her study a special weight.
Like Walter Rodney or James Ferguson before her, Dezalay is committed to describing the mechanics of extraction. The way African economies relate to the outside world follows a longstanding pattern, she argues. There are striking continuities in the corporate actors involved. They include colonial-era mining outfits and their postcolonial descendants, banks that greased the economic wheels of imperialism and finance extraction today, and the cocoa, coffee, or beer conglomerates that kept labor ticking along. Within this lies a question about colonial continuity and change. With the notable exception of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement, the question of “what changed at independence, what didn’t?” isn’t often asked in the world of international law (for historians it is almost a cliché). The innovation of this book is to ask that question in new places – in the conference rooms where arbitrations happen, for example, or the offices of Magic Circle law firms in Paris and New York. If partners at those firms read this book, they might think differently about the work they do.
Will they read it? A book like this faces a quandary. It is intended not for people like me, who are basically already convinced of its argument, but for the lawyers and businesspeople it profiles and often critiques. It is written in their language (I imagine they, unlike me, would need no help understanding what a Global Value Chain is). But it makes points that they will find uncomfortable, and I imagine that many of them would not recognize themselves in it. This is not a problem the author could have overcome. Perhaps the best she could hope for is that people critical of the extractive structures she describes will read this book and learn something about how they work. Those critics will see that lawyers might be their friends, their enemies, or both at once. At any rate, Lawyering Imperial Encounters is an excellent book, and Dezalay has done us a service by pulling back the veil on a well-hidden industry.
