Law, bureaucracy and reform

DASA’s emphasis on interdisciplinary and ‘on the ground’ research reveals how people’s everyday navigations between different legal orders generate new (and sometimes competing) understandings of justice.

Researchers

Academic staff:

• Morenikeji Asaaju: gender, marriage, family, slavery, emancipation, and the slave trade
• Jessica Johnson: social anthropology specialising in Southern Africa, anthropology of gender and law in Malawi
• Nathalie Raunet: belonging, citizenship, authoritarianism, transnationalism and borders
• Kate Skinner: social and political histories of modern and contemporary Ghana and Togo, political activism, gender activism, legal reform, print cultures, mass literacy and education in other African countries.

Doctoral researchers:

• Henry Brefo: Modernisation, Bureaucracy and Traditional rule in Ghana: The case of the Otumfuo Education Fund

Selected recent publications

• 2021. Morenikeji Asaaju. ‘The native court way’: disputes over marriage, divorce and ‘adultery’ in colonial courts in Abeokuta (Southwestern Nigeria), 1905-1960. Journal of West African History (accepted and in press).
• 2020. Kate Skinner. Gendering Citizenship and Decolonizing Justice in 1960s Ghana: revisiting the struggle for family law reform, American Journal of Legal History 60 (3): 357-387.
• 2019. Nathalie Raunet. Elections and borderlands in Ghana. African Affairs 118 (473): 672-691.
• 2020. Jessica Johnson (co-edited with George Karekwaivanane), Pursuing Justice in Africa Competing Imaginaries and Contested Practices [Free downloadable version]
• 2020. Kate Skinner, The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women – 40 years on. Democracy in Africa

Projects

• The Family House project
• Learning, Leveraging and Living with the Law

Events

• 2019 Cadbury Workshop, ‘Law, Custom and Urban Property in Africa’.

Find out more

• Research in African Studies and Anthropology
• Doctoral researchers
• Africa Talks seminars