14th March 2026

Author: Aisling Kenny, Legal Intern, Institute for Human Rights and development in Africa.

International law as we know it is a product of European modernity that has been shaped by imperial power, and founded upon universal abstractions that ignore disparate state histories, contexts, experiences, opportunities, and development. It is a discipline that emerged from European intellectual and political traditions that embodies the ideas, values, and beliefs of the Global North.

Although political colonisation has formally ended, ironically international law is one mechanism by which its effects persist via asymmetrical global power relations. Its origins are rooted in colonial practices that equated a colony’s lack of sovereignty to a lack of civilisation, thus legitimising conquest and exploitation in the name of the European civilising mission. These logics continue to shape the international order in line with Global North interests – for example by continuously redrawing the boundaries of sovereignty, as occurred with the conception of modern human rights law that overrode traditional principles of non-intervention, thus rendering Global South states vulnerable to interventions that would previously have been unlawful. 

The codification of economic, social, and cultural rights in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) reflects a focus on subaltern human rights priorities that were shaped by the systemic oppression and economic marginalisation that characterised colonial rule in the Global South. This emphasis on group rights is distinct from the individualistic civil and political priorities of the Global North that emerged in the context of World War II in response to ideologies of authoritarianism, fascism, and totalitarianism, and are codified in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). In the African context in particular, international human rights norms have been adapted into regional frameworks that include institutions such as the African Court on Humans and Peoples’ Rights, and instruments such as the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.

However, rather than reflecting local contexts and indigenous legal traditions, these institutions and instruments demonstrate how Western conceptions of international law continue to structure the production of legal knowledge and practice in Africa, embedding regional frameworks in Western epistemology. 

Decolonial theory and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) have challenged this structural bias, highlighting how international law perpetuates global inequality and systemic marginalisation. Decolonial international law seeks to dismantle the universalisation of European legal standards by recognising the coexistence of multiple forms of knowledge, being, and legal ordering. TWAIL similarly critiques the role of international law in sustaining global hierarchies, but does so from the standpoint of the “Third World”* – a historically and politically constituted category of societies shaped by colonial subjugation and ongoing marginalisation within the global order. Despite its contested nature, the term operates within TWAIL in an oppositional way, as “a necessary and effective response to the abstractions that do violence to difference“. These interventions have been central in destabilising dominant narratives and challenging the Eurocentricity of international law. Building on these approaches, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism offer philosophical lenses for imagining how international law might be reconstructed in ways that reorient legal framework towards African epistemologies and culturally grounded visions of justice.

Afrofuturism is an intellectual and philosophical framework that draws on African histories and cultures, as well as speculative imaginaries, to envision alternative futures. It positions Africans as agents across the past, present, and future, to challenge dominant Western narratives of progress and modernity. Beyond aestheticism, Afrofuturism also functions as a political and ethical framework that foregrounds the African experience, and raises questions about who has the power to imagine and define the future. Within legal and political thought, this approach encourages forms of colonial repair that extend beyond material compensation to include the re-centering of marginalised epistemologies, histories, and legal traditions that have been suppressed by colonial and imperial systems.

While Afrofuturism is rooted specifically in the experiences of the African diaspora, particularly in relation to race, identity, and nationality, Africanfuturism offers a more explicitly African-centred approach to reimagining international law. As articulated by Okorafor, Africanfuturism is grounded in African histories, cultures, and mythologies, and prioritises local epistemologies and ancestral knowledge without mediation through external frames of reference. This distinction is significant, as it enables the articulation of futures – and, by extension, legal orders – that emerge from African social, cultural, and political realities. 

Afrofuturism both complements and extends TWAIL and decolonial approaches by shifting the analytical focus from what international law has been, to what it could be totally reimagined as. In this sense, it introduces a speculativeness that is largely missing from historically grounded critiques of international law, giving way for a more inventive project of legal transformation. 

Africanfuturism further builds on this by situating such reimagining more explicitly within continental African realities, grounding speculative possibilities in local knowledge systems and lived realities.  

In this way, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism function as both methods and as orientations. As methods, they encourage a deliberate departure from inherited legal theorisation, refusing the assumption that concepts such as sovereignty or legitimacy must be defined within European epistemologies. As orientations, they guide international law away from universalisms and towards plurality. 

Essentially, an Africanfuturistic perspective frames the international legal order as a political construct that reshapes local realities while presenting itself as neutral. This framing opens space to re-conceive international law as an imaginative domain in which alternative configurations of power, responsibility, and community can be articulated. 

To illustrate this with an example, we can consider precolonial Akan society in Ghana, where political life was structured around an ethic of mutual aid and a belief that individuals are entitled to support from others to achieve well-being. From this perspective, political institutions were expected to promote collective welfare, extending responsibility beyond formal legal obligations to encompass relational and communal duties. 

When Western corporations began mining in these communities, they understood legal obligations through the institutionalised frameworks of the international legal order. These frameworks prioritised formal compliance, contractual obligations, and individual rights. By contrast, local communities understood corporate responsibility in terms of shared prosperity, coexistence, and the practical conditions necessary to sustain everyday life. 

The contrasting interpretations of legal responsibility reflect fundamentally different normative orders. Communities experienced the imposition of an external system that failed to recognise local expectations of collective welfare. Corporations, in turn, perceived these expectations as exceeding their legal obligations. This disjuncture illustrates how international law can function as an external system that restructures local realities while marginalising existing normative frameworks.

An Africanfuturist lens foregrounds these local epistemologies as foundational rather than peripheral, enabling international law to be reimagined not as an external system imposed on African communities, but as a framework that is reshaped by local contexts. In doing so, it opens up the possibility of an international legal system that is emancipated from legacies of colonialism and imperialism. In the case of the Akan community in Ghana, that might involve extractive corporations recognising communal responsibility, relational accountability, and collective well-being as central organising principles, rather than exceptions to dominant legal norms.  

Importantly, by emphasising imagination and speculation, Afrofuturism disrupts the perceived inevitability of existing legal arrangements. It challenges the notion that the current structures of international law represent the endpoint of legal development and instead opens conceptual space for radically different institutional and normative possibilities. These could include legal systems that prioritise interdependence and relational forms of sovereignty. Africanfuturism further extends the principle of imaginative rethinking by grounding it in African epistemologies, histories, and social practices, offering a specifically continental framework for re-imagination. 

Overall, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism can expand the horizons of TWAIL and decolonial legal theory by moving beyond critique and toward reimagining. By creating conceptual and epistemic space for alternative legal futures, they allow for the imagining of legal systems rooted in African epistemologies and lived experiences. Africanfuturism, in particular, ensures that this reimagining is not filtered through Western frameworks, but emerges directly from African knowledge systems. 

About the Authors:

Aisling Kenny is a legal intern at IHRDA with a background in international law and sociology, specialising in displacement, migration, and refugee rights.