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OKAFOR, OBIORA CHINEDU (3) answer(s).
 
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ID:   074639


Poverty, agency and resistance in the future of international l: an African perspective / Okafor, Obiora Chinedu   Journal Article
Okafor, Obiora Chinedu Journal Article
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Publication 2006.
Summary/Abstract This article enquires into the likely posture of future international law with respect to African peoples. It does so by focusing on three of the most important issues that have defined, and are likely to continue to define, international law's engagement with Africans. These are: the grinding poverty in which most Africans live, the question of agency in their historical search for dignity, and the extent to which these African peoples can effectively resist externally imposed frameworks and measures that have negative effects on their social, economic and political experience. International law's future posture in these respects is considered through an examination of concrete debates relating to agricultural subsidies, debt usury and relief therefrom, and the relocation of framework socioeconomic governance of almost every African state to external institutions. Insights about what the future holds for the effectiveness of Third World resistance are derived from a consideration of the broad lessons that can be learned from the successes or failures of some past Third World struggles.
Key Words Social Change  Africa  International Law 
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2
ID:   178006


Presence through absence? Understanding the role of capital in the African Human Rights Action Plan / Okafor, Obiora Chinedu   Journal Article
Okafor, Obiora Chinedu Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract This study examines the African Human Rights Action Plan (AHRAP) through the lens of Upendra Baxi's germinal theory on the emergence in our time of a ‘trade-related, market-friendly human rights’ (TREMF) thesis that is challenging the specific understandings of ‘people-centric’ human rights that are predicated in the letter and spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDH). Baxi contends, instead, that the dominant strands of the contemporary understandings of human rights are – for the most part – designed to protect the interests of global capital. That said, human rights frameworks in low-income countries need to be studied with a view to what they say and don't say about global capital. Despite its attempt to facilitate a progressive realisation of human rights in Africa, the AHRAP does not rise far enough above the TREMF paradigm to re-locate itself within the UDH one. This is due to the AHRAP not adequately theorising and analysing the role of capital in the (non)realisation of human rights in Africa. By allowing trade and market practices to slip to a significant extent beyond its purview, the AHRAP privileges – to a significant degree – the needs/interests of capital over the human rights of ordinary Africans. That is, the victims of the excesses of capital in Africa are reincarnated in the AHRAP document by the fact of their exclusion from it.
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3
ID:   090314


Remarkable returns: the influence of a labour-led socio-economic rights movement on legislative reasoning, process and action in Nigeria, 1999-2007 / Okafor, Obiora Chinedu   Journal Article
Okafor, Obiora Chinedu Journal Article
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Publication 2009.
Summary/Abstract During 1999-2007, a labour-led but broad-based socio-economic rights movement, which focused on a pro-poor (and therefore highly popular) anti-fuel price hike message, persuaded and/or pressured Nigeria's federal legislature, the National Assembly, to: mediate between it and the Executive Branch of Government; take it seriously enough to lobby it repeatedly; re-orient its legislative processes; explicitly oppose virtually all of the Executive Branch's fuel price hikes; and reject key anti-labour provisions in a government bill. Yet the movement did not always succeed in its efforts to influence the National Assembly. This article maps, discusses, contextualises and analyses these generally remarkable developments. It also argues that while many factors combined to facilitate or militate against the movement's impact on legislative reasoning, process and action during the relevant period, this movement's 'mass social movement' character was the pivotal factor that afforded it the necessary leverage to exert considerable, if limited, influence on the National Assembly.
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